>The argument is essentially technological. Computers and robots are getting much better. Soon enough, your local McDonald’s will be entirely automated
If technology is ever increasing and replacing manual jobs
>These are abstract, constructed jobs. If we had to, we could make do with far fewer software programmers
Then how on earth is a software engineer a "constructed" job? This an awful example.
I think the overall premise is probably correct though, as human beings we need goals, we need structure and something to do, so we will always "make up" jobs for society to function correctly. And there are menial jobs that aren't going to be automated any time soon.It's pretty tough to automate a call centre for example, human's are not going to buy a product from an automated voice, and we're a long, long way away from AI being an effective sales person (ie perfect human voice, able to make a "connection" with someone.)
>If technology is ever increasing and replacing manual jobs
>These are abstract, constructed jobs. If we had to, we could make do with far fewer software programmers
Then how on earth is a software engineer a "constructed" job?
Well, it's obvious to me.
Some software engineers are essential to this "ever increasing technology" that is "replacing manual jobs" -- e.g those writing code for industrial robots, etc.
But the vast majority of programmers are doing non essential (to substinence and hard, pragmatic value) BS coding, that just creates a huge pile of additional services and soft businesses.
Creating robots that can build cars: useful. Creating yet another social sharing site, etc, not so useful. Plus a lot of programming only caters to needs artificially inflated by bureaucracy and additional regulations.
Communication efforts afters BBS and TECO editor: useful.
Yet another social sharing site, etc, not so useful.
I don't see what's that hard to understand about it.
Or did you think that when I wrote: "Creating robots that can build cars: useful" I meant as some kind of axiomatic math robot that THAT AND ONLY THAT is useful?
Just because you and I can't imagine a social sharing site that is to Facebook what Google is to Altavista doesn't mean it doesn't exist. We don't know until the alternatives have been tried, and "yet another social sharing site" are those attempts.
No, we do know that it doesn't exist. We'd see it.
And making "yet another social sharing site" are NOT those attempts.
Just because they share the same segment ("social sharing sites") doesn't mean of them are attempts at improvement. Just as making yet another car is not an attempt to build the next kind of car. E.g. Chevy Malibu 2013 edition is merely a re-hash, not an "attempt to build something new", like, say, Tesla is.
Google was an attempt to build something better than Altavista from the moment it was still an algorithm (not even a website yet). It wasn't just some me-too web search engine that evolved into better than Altavista -- it attempted to better it in it's very design intentions.
I've always thought that call centre jobs are exactly the kind of thing that (google + apple + microsoft's) voice recognition software will soon largely replace.
They're one of the few professions that could painlessly be replaced given sufficient advances in software. Other professions, such as fully autonomous hairdresser or shelf stacker, would require mechanical advances and investments as well.
The problem with IVR is not that its voice recognition is bad, it that it doesn't really do anything a simple menu driven system couldn't do. It can't understand what you want to do, something that for a human is trivial. Why are companies so afraid of talking to their customers?
The other day I had to call in a power outage to ComEd. A computer asked for my location (account number / phone number), then said that there is a crew that has been dispatched and the ETA for restoration was 2 hours.
>Cowen goes on in his new book to explain that regular folks are doomed. The economy will only need the top 10% of us.
That's pulling the cart before the horse.
Economy is not supposed to be some natural force that people and states have to obey. It was supposed to be the result of conscious, deliberate action, by the people (and their organizations, representatives etc), to advance their means of living.
So, "economy will only need the top 10% of us" means: we are not in control of our state, we are merely slaves and resources to be used as it pleases some outside force.
Which goes contrary to the very notion of democracy (as it was developed in ancient Athens), which was all about empowering people over external forces (Gods, nature, the will of the King, fate, etc).
Democracy in his perception is when the uneducated masses who operate based on their 'instinctual' desires run the show.
He believes Democracy is just a brief transition phase to Tyranny.
The highest is an aristocracy run by philosopher kings who rule by reason and wisdom and dedicate their lives to this and are not allowed to own property.
By "a higher level" do you mean Plato was right in the same sense that "communism is a perfectly good economic/political system, it's just that real communism has never really been tried"?
Or do you mean that Plato was possessed of a higher intelligence than puny mortals like us could hope to properly contemplate, possibly even incapable of error, and therefore we should defer to his musings without using our critical thinking to apply the benefit of 2,360 years of hindsight?
Actually I'm just trying to get Karma by sounding smart. I really just copied and pasted everything from Wikipedia. I have no idea what I'm talking about.
Plato also was a fan of eugenics and communal child-rearing.
I'm more in line with Churchill -- Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. I don't accept that a man and particularly his descendants are better humans than me because they own the rights to a mine, or invented <technology X>, or that their great-great-grandfather owned a manor somewhere while mine was farming somewhere else.
>Yes, but the same democracy in Athens had strict rules about voting participation, and about 35% of the population was enslaved.
Which is a historical accident, based on the norms of the era, and is beside the point.
After all, the same thing (slavery) was happening in every, or almost every, country at the time. The innovation is what they CHANGED, not what they maintained.
Absolutely agree. Our society is whatever we want it to be.
Unfortunately, democracy is out of vogue these days. The popular trend seems to be toward seeing society in terms of "natural" economic forces inexorably leading towards a certain fate.
PS: I also take strong exception to the concept of "the top 10% of us." The top 10% among what metric? Athleticism? Leadership ability? Creativity? Courage in war? Obviously not any of these things. Our society favors some mixture of above-average intellect and ability to do boring detail work for long hours. The people in the "top 10%" would certainly never be recognized as such in the kind of society that existed just a couple of hundred years ago.
agreed on the detail work aspect. I know a lot of brilliant people who are floundering because they're trying to re-draw the lines/boundaries/parameters of work in order to maintain their mental vibrance, where as many many less intelligent folks are killing it in finance/law/whatever just be being able to log a large number of hours reviewing documents that i'm sure are less than earth-shattering.
Automating farming and improving efficiency freed up people to take on jobs as potters and blacksmiths.
By this article's logic, both potters and blacksmiths are abstract, constructed jobs.
To look at it another way, we're all standing on the shoulders of giants. This is what we call 'civilisation' (possibly with a z, if one is a colonial commoner).
"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots."
I want to find out if regular folks are doomed or not, and I can't because clearly this blog is hosted on a single-instance WordPress host or something.
I've been thinking about this for a while, from a technological standpoint I agree with this story, from a sociological standpoint I don't.
People for the most part don't trust machines at the moment, which will slow down acceptance of things like self-driving cars, which Google has proved to be safer than human-driven cars. Another thing "regular folks" don't want is to be talking to robots all day long. At the McDonalds counter they want to be able to yell at the clerk for not getting the order right, and want the satisfaction of seeing a manager reprimand the clerk. They want to make small-talk with the cashier at the gas station, they want a human hair-dresser to tell them what human fashion is like this year.
If the world was full of (semi)-autistic developers from silicon valley, sure, this would be feasible. In the real world the "regular folks" themselves will be the reason they still have their place in the world.
Also, in order to automate everything a lot of raw materials will be necessary, which will lead to a price increase which in turn could make people cheaper than automation.
People don't trust machines yet everyone of use uses them daily. What's a dishwasher, an ATM, or a microwave if not a specialized robot? Most people today don't consider machines they use everyday to be a robot and the same thing will happen with other robots like automated clerks, cars etc.
Robots have a way of sneaking on people, without people noticing it, until they are out of a job.
I have observed the opposite in my own life: people don't seem to mind ordering things from Amazon, which involves no small talk unless they catch the UPS guy in the act of tossing the package towards the doorstep. In my experience people favor using credit cards at the self serve pump over having to talk to a cashier to pay for gas. Lots of people use the ATM in a bank's lobby, even when the bank is open and they could go make small talk with a teller. Does anybody go out of their way to buy a car without ABS, because they "don't trust" the machine to do a better job of braking than they can?
Russ Roberts (the author of the above piece) also interviewed Tyler Cowen on EconTalk where they discussed the case of compensation to (book) writers, http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/09/tyler_cowen_on.html Cowen argues that superstars eat an ever larger share of the total compensation while Roberts notes that the average is being dragged down by the fact that there are few, if any, barriers to entry for new writers and writers who would have done well in the past (due to their talent, education, ability) still do well today.
Well, we could talk about something substantive and then see... I think that anyone who is buying into Cowen's new piece should also read The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality by Mises especially regarding automation.
Posting things for other people to read, is not the same as having a substantive discussion. In fact, criticizing Cowen's credibility rather than his arguments is not a product way to argue in the first place.
The paper is a resounding refutation of Cowen's other work. Given how terrible he has proven himself in the past, I am happy to reject this new work out of hand. From what little I read, I again suggest people to read Mises' Anti-Capitalistic Mentality regarding the ludicrous notion that machines are a bad thing.
But the fact remains that your argument against Cowen is merely and simply an appeal to authority.
The intellectually honest comment to have made in the first place would have been "Certain economic theorists assert that Cowen [has no credibility|is an idiot|whatever they assert]".
That might have been a useful start to a discussion. Or not. Who knows. YMMV.
As it is, the comment is nothing more than gainsaying based on information you are either unwilling or incapable of summarizing and sharing.
It's really not much better than "Cowen's an idiot, neeyah".
In the interests of full disclosure, I know next to nothing about the OP and the topics discussed between the OP and this comment.
Sadly, I don't need to in order to comment usefully on your comments, so empty of content they were. Nothing personal, eh?
I did not make an appeal to authority. That would be if I said Cowen is wrong merely because Block and Barnett said so. I am saying that Cowen is a joke for the reasons spelled out in Block and Barnett's paper. Those reasons are not merely "neeyah" and the arguments therein are not somehow invalid or cease to exist because I don't care to regurgitate them for you.
Non-argument; you just said absolutely nothing. The "best" economists in the world at the Fed are incapable of predicting and preventing things like the '08 collapse, yet they have credibility to you? Mainstream economists have no job prospects outside of academia or government because they are pseudoscientists a la alchemists capable of nothing more than reassurance of the king that printing ever more money will bring about prosperity the next time.
Given your username it appears that you may be an Austrian in your economic views. Citing one paper that purports to dispute one paper of Cowen hardly qualifies as enough evidence that he has no credibility on economics. Perhaps a bias in you is at work and that this bias leads you to your claim.
"what Cowen failed to consider is that most of us haven’t been needed in a long time. Maybe economists can’t even consider such a possibility"
Economists consider such a notion to be flawed, because if the jobs that currently exist aren't needed, why are their employers paying for them? We live in something very close to a free market. The author's idea that currently jobs are provided by society in order to preserves social order is 100% wrong.
>We live in something very close to a free market.
Hiring and firing is more difficult than you imagine, I think, due to transaction costs and emotional/social barriers.
I've read theories that suggest that unemployment and labour force participation remain stubbornly high (and may remain persistently high) as the Great Recession allowed the private sector to clean out "dead weight" employees it has maintained for longer than it needed to. In other words, it became easier and more acceptable to fire people.
yes especially from what i've seen at big corporations where i've worked, the same amount of work could be done with like 1/3rd or 1/5th of the staff if the managers paid more attention to efficiency. The recession aspect is really interesting and I bet this indeed happened, and I bet there is little negative feedback because most of these people add nothing to the company's efficacy anyway.
I never imagined that hiring/firing was not difficult, that is not really important for my argument.
The property of the free market that I was relying on was simply that employers only hire people that they expect, on average, to be worth their pay. There is nothing in our economy that would induce an employer to hire an "unnecessary" worker.
heh go sit in at a corporation then. i believe the core concept is that they have so much money that they'll generally hire a lot of people onto projects "just in case it helps the project move faster", basically overstaffing to an extreme degree where some are only adding small decorative support to the core laborers who are knocking down the real tasks.
And as you said they "hire people that they expect, on average, to be worth their pay" but when one turns out to be below average they seem to let them fester for a while before eventually figuring out what to do with them -- often a transfer rather than firing. At some big companies once you have the job, you have it. Worst case scenario is then hitting your ceiling with no chance of promotion but not usually a firing from what I've seen (and I'm in the contract world, where firing is actually much easier).
> that they expect, on average, to be worth their pay.
This is actually a pretty huge caveat. As it turns out, information is hugely limited and this has pretty far reaching implications for the shape of the labor market. Firms desire to grow and hire people to that end but they're necessarily pretty bad at guessing who will actually be profitable to hire and it's even difficult to figure out if the employees you already have are profitable and if so which ones. The result is often that lots of people get hired, many in capacities to try to figure this information out, and thanks to immense capital a few of them produce enough to employ the rest. This arrangement works because other firms are similarly handicapped but it is far from efficient in terms of resource, capital, or leisure allocation.
Some employers have contracts with the cities and states, that require them to keep specific amount of people employed in return for tax incentives and/or investments.
Some large corporation have people working because the government pays for that..
sure, but I'm not talking about specific instances, but the economy in general. There is no large deviation from the free market that causes more people to be employed than otherwise.
Let's not forget the fundamental purpose of jobs. It is to limit crime.
Before the modern age with its companies and jobs, rich people walked the streets with swords, daggers and pistols. Even so they could not fully protect themselves from pickpockets who slashed pockets with a knife to liberate a few coins or even just a silk handkerchief. Average people banded together to take down the rich folk when they could, killing in order to steal.
Some rich people realized that if they distributed cash to the average people under the guise of jobs, there would be no more motive to rob, steal and plunder. As a result, we have our modern and relatively peaceful world.
Unfortunately, the rich of today have forgotten the lesson learned by their forebears, and once again we are devolving into chaos and crime.
64 comments
[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadIf technology is ever increasing and replacing manual jobs
>These are abstract, constructed jobs. If we had to, we could make do with far fewer software programmers
Then how on earth is a software engineer a "constructed" job? This an awful example.
I think the overall premise is probably correct though, as human beings we need goals, we need structure and something to do, so we will always "make up" jobs for society to function correctly. And there are menial jobs that aren't going to be automated any time soon.It's pretty tough to automate a call centre for example, human's are not going to buy a product from an automated voice, and we're a long, long way away from AI being an effective sales person (ie perfect human voice, able to make a "connection" with someone.)
Edit:Grammar
Well, it's obvious to me.
Some software engineers are essential to this "ever increasing technology" that is "replacing manual jobs" -- e.g those writing code for industrial robots, etc.
But the vast majority of programmers are doing non essential (to substinence and hard, pragmatic value) BS coding, that just creates a huge pile of additional services and soft businesses.
Creating robots that can build cars: useful. Creating yet another social sharing site, etc, not so useful. Plus a lot of programming only caters to needs artificially inflated by bureaucracy and additional regulations.
Truly - why did anyone ever invest any communication effort after dialup BBS and the TECO editor.
I don't see what's that hard to understand about it.
Or did you think that when I wrote: "Creating robots that can build cars: useful" I meant as some kind of axiomatic math robot that THAT AND ONLY THAT is useful?
And making "yet another social sharing site" are NOT those attempts.
Just because they share the same segment ("social sharing sites") doesn't mean of them are attempts at improvement. Just as making yet another car is not an attempt to build the next kind of car. E.g. Chevy Malibu 2013 edition is merely a re-hash, not an "attempt to build something new", like, say, Tesla is.
Google was an attempt to build something better than Altavista from the moment it was still an algorithm (not even a website yet). It wasn't just some me-too web search engine that evolved into better than Altavista -- it attempted to better it in it's very design intentions.
They're one of the few professions that could painlessly be replaced given sufficient advances in software. Other professions, such as fully autonomous hairdresser or shelf stacker, would require mechanical advances and investments as well.
Didn't talk to a single person.
That's pulling the cart before the horse.
Economy is not supposed to be some natural force that people and states have to obey. It was supposed to be the result of conscious, deliberate action, by the people (and their organizations, representatives etc), to advance their means of living.
So, "economy will only need the top 10% of us" means: we are not in control of our state, we are merely slaves and resources to be used as it pleases some outside force.
Which goes contrary to the very notion of democracy (as it was developed in ancient Athens), which was all about empowering people over external forces (Gods, nature, the will of the King, fate, etc).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato's_five_regimes
* Just kidding.
2. Timocracy
3. Oligarchy
4. Democracy
5. Tyranny
He believes Democracy is just a brief transition phase to Tyranny.
The highest is an aristocracy run by philosopher kings who rule by reason and wisdom and dedicate their lives to this and are not allowed to own property.
Or do you mean that Plato was possessed of a higher intelligence than puny mortals like us could hope to properly contemplate, possibly even incapable of error, and therefore we should defer to his musings without using our critical thinking to apply the benefit of 2,360 years of hindsight?
I'm more in line with Churchill -- Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. I don't accept that a man and particularly his descendants are better humans than me because they own the rights to a mine, or invented <technology X>, or that their great-great-grandfather owned a manor somewhere while mine was farming somewhere else.
Coincidentally, about 300,000 people lived in Athens at the time, while it's estimated that only 30,000 people were eligible to vote.
Which is a historical accident, based on the norms of the era, and is beside the point.
After all, the same thing (slavery) was happening in every, or almost every, country at the time. The innovation is what they CHANGED, not what they maintained.
Unfortunately, democracy is out of vogue these days. The popular trend seems to be toward seeing society in terms of "natural" economic forces inexorably leading towards a certain fate.
PS: I also take strong exception to the concept of "the top 10% of us." The top 10% among what metric? Athleticism? Leadership ability? Creativity? Courage in war? Obviously not any of these things. Our society favors some mixture of above-average intellect and ability to do boring detail work for long hours. The people in the "top 10%" would certainly never be recognized as such in the kind of society that existed just a couple of hundred years ago.
Not quite. Our society is whatever we choose to make it. It is far from a foregone conclusion that what we choose will turn out to be what we want.
By this article's logic, both potters and blacksmiths are abstract, constructed jobs.
To look at it another way, we're all standing on the shoulders of giants. This is what we call 'civilisation' (possibly with a z, if one is a colonial commoner).
(For most of us, it's even FAR ABOVE).
I want to find out if regular folks are doomed or not, and I can't because clearly this blog is hosted on a single-instance WordPress host or something.
People for the most part don't trust machines at the moment, which will slow down acceptance of things like self-driving cars, which Google has proved to be safer than human-driven cars. Another thing "regular folks" don't want is to be talking to robots all day long. At the McDonalds counter they want to be able to yell at the clerk for not getting the order right, and want the satisfaction of seeing a manager reprimand the clerk. They want to make small-talk with the cashier at the gas station, they want a human hair-dresser to tell them what human fashion is like this year.
If the world was full of (semi)-autistic developers from silicon valley, sure, this would be feasible. In the real world the "regular folks" themselves will be the reason they still have their place in the world.
Also, in order to automate everything a lot of raw materials will be necessary, which will lead to a price increase which in turn could make people cheaper than automation.
If so, there are other ways of looking at the same data that Cowen uses to determine, and then extrapolate, a trend of increasing inequality, http://cafehayek.com/2013/11/when-facts-arent-facts.html
Russ Roberts (the author of the above piece) also interviewed Tyler Cowen on EconTalk where they discussed the case of compensation to (book) writers, http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/09/tyler_cowen_on.html Cowen argues that superstars eat an ever larger share of the total compensation while Roberts notes that the average is being dragged down by the fact that there are few, if any, barriers to entry for new writers and writers who would have done well in the past (due to their talent, education, ability) still do well today.
The intellectually honest comment to have made in the first place would have been "Certain economic theorists assert that Cowen [has no credibility|is an idiot|whatever they assert]".
That might have been a useful start to a discussion. Or not. Who knows. YMMV.
As it is, the comment is nothing more than gainsaying based on information you are either unwilling or incapable of summarizing and sharing.
It's really not much better than "Cowen's an idiot, neeyah".
In the interests of full disclosure, I know next to nothing about the OP and the topics discussed between the OP and this comment.
Sadly, I don't need to in order to comment usefully on your comments, so empty of content they were. Nothing personal, eh?
Economists consider such a notion to be flawed, because if the jobs that currently exist aren't needed, why are their employers paying for them? We live in something very close to a free market. The author's idea that currently jobs are provided by society in order to preserves social order is 100% wrong.
Hiring and firing is more difficult than you imagine, I think, due to transaction costs and emotional/social barriers.
I've read theories that suggest that unemployment and labour force participation remain stubbornly high (and may remain persistently high) as the Great Recession allowed the private sector to clean out "dead weight" employees it has maintained for longer than it needed to. In other words, it became easier and more acceptable to fire people.
The property of the free market that I was relying on was simply that employers only hire people that they expect, on average, to be worth their pay. There is nothing in our economy that would induce an employer to hire an "unnecessary" worker.
And as you said they "hire people that they expect, on average, to be worth their pay" but when one turns out to be below average they seem to let them fester for a while before eventually figuring out what to do with them -- often a transfer rather than firing. At some big companies once you have the job, you have it. Worst case scenario is then hitting your ceiling with no chance of promotion but not usually a firing from what I've seen (and I'm in the contract world, where firing is actually much easier).
This is actually a pretty huge caveat. As it turns out, information is hugely limited and this has pretty far reaching implications for the shape of the labor market. Firms desire to grow and hire people to that end but they're necessarily pretty bad at guessing who will actually be profitable to hire and it's even difficult to figure out if the employees you already have are profitable and if so which ones. The result is often that lots of people get hired, many in capacities to try to figure this information out, and thanks to immense capital a few of them produce enough to employ the rest. This arrangement works because other firms are similarly handicapped but it is far from efficient in terms of resource, capital, or leisure allocation.
Before the modern age with its companies and jobs, rich people walked the streets with swords, daggers and pistols. Even so they could not fully protect themselves from pickpockets who slashed pockets with a knife to liberate a few coins or even just a silk handkerchief. Average people banded together to take down the rich folk when they could, killing in order to steal.
Some rich people realized that if they distributed cash to the average people under the guise of jobs, there would be no more motive to rob, steal and plunder. As a result, we have our modern and relatively peaceful world.
Unfortunately, the rich of today have forgotten the lesson learned by their forebears, and once again we are devolving into chaos and crime.