Oh noes! We’re being replaced by machines!

I actually think that the problem will be dealt with by requiring more and more qualifications for every job (perhaps inventing some additional levels beyond PhD), so that in the USA, middle class children go to school and university, then spend twenty years in “graduate school”, nine years doing internships and then five years’ work before early retirement.

Agree with 2. This means good times for anyone in the business of creating and overseeing the barriers to entry and monitoring who is allowed through them. AKA “academics”.

#1 and#2

Much work has already been done to deal with the problem of the employment prospects of the over-educated. For example, what about “self-important newspaper columnist”, regurgitating semi-understood gobbets of semi-digested factoids gained via skimming through (and then quickly googling) whatever happens to be ‘trending’ on Twitter? This is a job that didn’t exist 50 years ago, and which no one asked to be created, for the good reason that the ‘product’ of this trade was something no one wants or needs. Nor does it require any skills or abilities to be a ‘columnist’ which hasn’t stopped it being almost exclusively the preserve of the white middle classes.

But the moral of the story is: don’t discount the capacity of capitalism to simply create whole new swathes of meaningless employment for the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie, and then creating equally meaningless ‘qualifications’ which price these (pointless, but well paid) jobs out of the grasp of the proletarian hordes. Cf, advertising, management consultancy, most ‘research’, most work in ‘think tanks’ etc. etc. etc. In a de-industrialised country like the UK, most work is already simply the intellectual equivalent of digging a hole and then filling it in again.

It’s grossly unfair, incidentally, to compare people who work in these kinds of jobs with sexworkers: whatever else one might think of them, prostitutes satisfy real human needs: not an accusation that anyone is going to be leveling at Brad DeLong anytime soon.

in the US, since about the mid 1970s, where the number of hours worked has been steadily rising.

Really? OECD has average annual hours worked per worker at 1,768 for the US in 2009, the lowest it’s been since 1950 (which is as far back as I can get it to go). In 1975 it was 1,839 hours.
As for the quote you give, the OECD figures are 1,829 for 1979 and 1,802 hours for 2006.

http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=ANHRS

The same seems to be true more or less across the OECD – 2009 was either the lowest or close to the lowest, and the general trend is down everywhere.

“Of course, if you take “free markets”, extensive private property and the domination of the political system by money (so that you can’t do much about the first two) as givens…”

What? Are you suggesting there is someone who would _not_ take these as givens? Who are they, and why not? Where do you see signs of hope that this will change in the near future–not counting, of course, the total collapse of our economy, the breakup of the U.S. into civil war, and the decline of the civilization into to Mad Max thunderdome country. In which case, our new-found free time will surely not be used for “human development.” Cannibalism, yes, development, not so much.

The third possibility is dependent on the independence of utility functions (as in Von Neumann–Morgenstern rationality). This is not the case.

13: Then Schor appears to have misquoted the EPI report. Here’s a link to the latest “State of Working America”:
http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/charts/view/110

1979: 1,829 hours worked. 2007: 1,798 hours worked.
Unsurprisingly, since it draws from the OECD data. The BLS agrees.
ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/suppl/empsit.ceseeb2.txt

And this could have been better phrased for UK readers:

Married couples aged twenty-five to fifty-four with children were on the job 413 more hours than in 1979

…Well, that’s obviously one option for what to do with your free time.

Cross-posted; thanks ajay.

And yes, here we are I think:

http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/charts/view/128

(note also this is for married couples with children – ie, not by any means the whole story when it comes to the labour market, but not a politically or socially unimportant demographic slice)

James Meade, Efficiency, Equality, and the Ownership of Property (1964) is fun on this kind of thing (as well as being an important source for John Rawls, who openly takes his notion of a ‘property-owning democracy’ from Meade).

[One of the benefits of the property-owning democracy, Meade suggests, curiously, is that those who act in plays and take part in sports will ‘no longer be degraded as the poor sycophants of immoderately rich patrons’.]

On working hours: sorry, but the EPI (and almost everyone else) relies upon market/paid working hours way too much.

There are four sets of time. Personal time (you can’t get someone else to eat, sleep or wash for you), leisure time, household production hours and market production hours.

One of the stories of the century just gone is the way that mechanisation (ie, the machines are doing it all for us) had cut, hugely, the number of household production hours required. Some of this reduction turns up in rising female market hours and the rest in very large increases in leisure hours for both men and women.

So we have an example of what happens when technological progress makes human labour unnecessary: people take more leisure.

There’s another part of this debate which I’ve never really understood (cue various stating so what’s new with Worstall not understanding something?).

If everything’s being made by machines, including machines making the machines, then everything becomes extraordinarily cheap. We might even be able to say that that long awaited day of communism has dawned, a surplus of everything. In which case, really, who is worried by the distribution of income when every physical good and most services (there will always be positional goods and services of course) is as cheap as chips?

I just don’t get the worry about human labour being made technologically obsolescent. If what was formerly made by human labour is now made by machines, can’t we all be farmers in the morning, philosphers in the afternoon and musicians at night? (I’m sure I’ve butchered that part of Marx ….)

As to commercial sex getting cheaper: everyone forgotten their Baumol? The ultimate in services is going to be priced according to the average productivity of labour isn’t it?

The funny thing is that back in the late 70s/early 80s there was a lot of ‘the robots are coming’ hype with the idea that manufacturing jobs would be replaced largely by robots. And of course, that Japan was going to dominated the global economy.

As it turned out, workers in developing nations were a lot cheaper than robots – and I expect that to remain the case until capital runs out of any cheaper stable locations to move.

The really big question is whether the supranational elite are going to be pulled back down to earth, in much the same way as the European aristocracy. You can only ignore the needs of the population you live amongst for so long.

Of course, with the Singularity, all the thinking will be done by digital brains in vats and the peons will just know what has to be done.

As it turned out, workers in developing nations were a lot cheaper than robots – and I expect that to remain the case until capital runs out of any cheaper stable locations to move.

This isn’t entirely true: there are 1,300,000 robots working in industry at the moment. And one of the best areas to be selling industrial robots is, in fact, in emerging markets – China, Taiwan, Indonesia, India. This wouldn’t be the case if they could employ cheaper human workers instead.
The story is more to do with the technological limits on what industrial robots can do, rather than the economic limits on their employment.

Looking at it, in fact, the “hours per week” series is practically trendless – all of the increase has come in “weeks per year”.

I actually think that the problem will be dealt with by requiring more and more qualifications for every job (perhaps inventing some additional levels beyond PhD)

Habilitations for all!

31, 33: ack. Good point, I failed to note that. Sorry.

a) I am now puzzled by what that change represents. It surely can’t be paid holiday: US workers don’t get four weeks of holiday now and they certainly didn’t get eight weeks back in 1973. Is this representing people leaving or entering the workforce part way through the year? As in, I was unemployed at the start of the year and got a job in February, therefore weeks worked =46 out of 52? Did the average worker in 1973 really spend almost two months of the year out of work?

b) I am also puzzled why the BLS annual hours figures that I cited in 16 show a clear decline and the CPS figures (also from the BLS!) show an equally clear increase over exactly the same period.

c) as 24 points out, social shifts make this whole exercise somewhat futile, because it counts only paid employment outside the home, and assumes that time spent (eg) washing clothes by hand is “free time”.

If you’re a tailor and you get a sewing machine, then you could make twice as many suits a week (and get twice as much money) or you could get your current workload dealt with by Wednesday lunchtime and take the rest of the week off to learn the cello, or somewhere in between those two. This is the situation you’re talking about, I think – and it’s what has actually been happening, if those figures are correct.

But if a machine alone can do your job more efficiently than you can, then you won’t be able to do that: you’ll be out of a job. Inventing automatic telephone exchanges doesn’t mean that you have lots of part-time telephone operators learning the cello. It means you have lots of unemployed telephone operators. This, I think, is what Krugman is talking about.

I don’t think these two scenarios are actually that different. Suppose, instead of the tailors owning their own machines, someone else (let’s call him a capitalist) employs ten tailors. Sewing machines come on the market; they’re expensive, but because of the productivity increase, in the long term more efficient than the labor-intensive way.

Then the capitalist wants the most efficient solution: instead of ten tailors working part-time, who would need ten machines that sit idle while the tailors are at cello practice, the capitalist wants three tailors each to work full-time (in shifts) on just one machine (to keep down costs), and lays off the other seven. Of course he doesn’t offer them a raise, even though their productivity has tripled — the three that stay on are lucky to be staying on at all, any of the other seven would be happy to take their place rather than go learn a completely new trade. (Machine assisted tailoring is a *partly* new trade, but I’m assuming that skilled tailors have some advantage at it — otherwise they’re even worse off, you might as well lay off all ten and hire three new unskilled workers at minimum wage, if you’re going to have to train them anyway. Or stick to the old ways until you are put out of business by a new startup with a smaller labor force, which is economically equivalent.)

Unless there’s a social institution to prevent him from instituting that solution, that is what he will do, and since it is the most efficient, it will win in market competition too (i.e. a rival worker-owned company that keeps on all ten of its tailors part-time and has multiple machines so they can all work convenient hours can’t compete on quality and/or price while also paying a decent wage to all of its members).

Or, in short, if three human workers time-sharing a machine can outproduce ten workers without machines, that’s bad news for seven out of ten workers, and with the resulting slackness in the labor market, the other three will be lucky just to tread water. And in any case at least 70% of the human capital represented by the skilled tailors has become worthless surplus overnight (100% if you assume it doesn’t carry over to make them more skilled at machine-assisted tailoring).

40: I don’t think you should be using the weekly hours worked figures as a basis for comparison, because that ignores changes in the number of weeks worked, as your namesake pointed out in 33.
Annual hours worked seem to have fallen in every OECD country by between 10% and 20% since the 1960s. There’s a steady drop in every one of them.
I think this is a fairly important statistic.

But leaving statistics aside: do you see the distinction I was trying to make in 3? You’re arguing that technological advancement will make everybody more productive in their jobs. Krugman and DeLong are pointing out that in fact it will also make some people obsolete and these two outcomes are not equivalent in anything except the very basic “total hours worked” sense.

Prostitution? Well, that’s one possibility. Although…. If the same few people own (control) all the same stuff they do today, I’d expect the only real jobs to be in a) security (protecting their stuff from the rest of us), and b) propaganda (making sure we don’t find out what they’re up to.) Using that model, and looking around the country today, I’d say that Joe Arpaio and David Brooks have a lock on the future.

And yes, 47 years ago, some people had a different idea: The Triple Revolution.

chris’s argument @ 42 brings up the question of entrepreneurship. chris assumes the person who buys the sewing machine is a capitalist who hires unskilled sewing machine operators and relies on the expertise of the machine manufacturer. In reality, what is more likely is that a tailor buys the machine and hires operators or other tailors, and relies on his own expertise. In the next generation, of course, the tailor has been bought out or out-competed by a financial manager, and the question rises where the expertise will be coming from (the singularity, I guess).

Yes indeed, I see that distinction ajay. It does prompt some dystopian/utopian thoughts though. Should we expect a future with service-sector peons (and sex-workers) catering to the whims of the people lucky enough to own the amazing machines that have taken all the good jobs? Or should the benefit of these wonderful machines be distributed among the population as a whole, who freed from the need to labour (including in the provision of services to the gilded few) to satisfy their needs, increasingly engage in arts and crafts?

Hang on a minute? What’s that you say?

_after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly _

It isn’t paid vacation. The CPS (from whence these numbers all come) codes paid vacation time as time spent working. I think this has to be an increase in full-time working relative to part-time, and I am duly amazed that stay-at-home mothers are as rare as they apparently are.

http://wox.sagepub.com/content/28/1/40.full.pdf

seems useful, and points out that the right-hand tail of the distribution of household hours worked (ie, very long work weeks) has fattened considerably over the period.

Also note that we really haven’t had that many marvellous labour-saving devices invented in the 1990s – the decline in self-reported hours of nonmarket domestic work is largely a result of Americans (and others) having fewer children and starting families later.

No matter how good robots get, there’ll still be menial jobs which don’t require any high-level skills, but where people are prepared to accept worse service as long as they get the ‘human touch’: things like call centre operators, sales assistants in shops, and yes, prostitutes. (It’s not clear how flexible demand will be for these services, though.) Some people even pay a premium for ‘hand-made’ goods, so there’s a guaranteed niche for humans in manufacturing as well, albeit a small one.

I think industrial automation has been staved off by globalisation to some extent – it’s still cheaper to employ human beings in much of Asia than to build robots in the US – but this won’t be true forever. I think the next big acceleration in automation will come as China and India start to deplete their reserve armies of inefficiently employed labour (which is still vast in India’s case at least), or even later if sub-Saharan Africa manages to industrialise in a big way.

Marx does not first emphasize the job-destroying aspects of technical change. Technical change, i.e. transition from manufacture to machino-facture, reduces the need for muscle power. This allows the entry of women and children into industrial production; that, in turn, allows capital to hire the whole family for the wage once paid to the male breadwinner. Moreover, since the introduction of machinery which otherwise creates the possibility for the minimization of labor time burdens capitalists with the threat of moral depreciation, they seek longer hours and the relay system to make sure the new expensive equipment is in fact amortized.

It is also cheaper for capitalists to extend the working day and add extra shifts to produce additional surplus value than it would be to purchase additional plant and hire workers to work in that plant.

Here we see that capitalists have an incentive to prolong the working day due to the introduction of machinery. That is, to increase the length of individual shifts and to increase the number of shifts per day.

Hence, the paradox that the most efficient means for the reduction of working times becomes the most unfailing means for prolonging it.

Now it is true that Marx seems to think in the course of capital accumulation the absolute size of the surplus part of industrial reserve army of labor will grow.

His reasoning seems to be that as capital accumulates and the organic composition of capital therewith, capital will not be able to sustain the rate of growth needed for the demand for labor to keep apace with the increasing supply of labor created by (i) the dispossession of those in traditional sectors of agriculture and handicraft production (this was especially true in the early phases of capital accumulation–hence, Malthus) ; (ii) the workers displaced in sectors made obsolescent by what Schumpeter would later call the gale of creative destruction; and (iii) population growth.

But even given all this Marx does not emphasize the job-displacing effects of technical change. In fact it is wholly possible that if accumulation becomes strong enough that the demand for labor would outstrip the supply actually available for exploitation even as the organic composition of capital is increasing. This undersupply could be compounded by restrictive immigration law or the lack of infrastructure in places where labor could be plentiful.

For Marx, the rate of accumulation drives the process. It slows down once the organic composition of capital rises to the point that there is insufficient surplus value to finance and to expect from further accumulation. This is what fundamentally causes unemployment, not technical change in itself.

I am not quite sure whether this is what GA Cohen was saying that Marx was saying. I don’t think he gets Marx right in his book.

Have a look at Asimo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3C5sc8b3xM
If you follow the allied videos, you’ll see that it (he, she) catches balls and does other things. Just amazing stuff.
“Asimo” is in honor of Asimov, by the way.
Now I’m sure he (she, it) costs a mint. So did the Eniac computer.
But when she (he, it), is fully functional, lovely hair, and priced as a consumer good, I will have two questions:
Can I have the one who looks like Angelina Jolie?
And can I send it to my job, to do the work for me?

Also remember that Marx thought that the capital-wage labor relation was a fetter on mechanization. Because capitalists pay for only labor power, not labor time, it may well be cheaper for them to use labor even when a machine would cost less labor time than it would replace.

But Ajay why hasn’t the working day continued to decrease with the continual rise of productivity.

More can be produced in a given period, so i. workers could all work less with the same level of output or ii. they could work the same time and produce more, with profits rising or iii. they could work more with wages rising.

Why not i? And why have profits risen more than wages to the extent that working time remains the same. Dumenil and Levy show that this in fact to have been the case.

I once worked in a software shop when the CEO started a major (and secret) strategic effort called Project Noah, to eliminate our dependence on one critical partner (who was also a potential competitor). Why “Noah”? “Because Noah built the Ark before the flood.”

So I told my manager I was working on a shell script to auto-generate production code for new features, so we wouldn’t have to depend on development staff. I called it Project Moses, as in “let my people go”.

Ha ha! A shell script! Hee hee!

Oh shit.

But Ajay why hasn’t the working day continued to decrease with the continual rise of productivity.

It has, see comment 10.

What? Are you insane?

No, I just get these headaches.

In one of my scenarios most people who had jobs had ones which involved servicing the needs of the small class of machine-owners

In other words: most of the population (except for the wealthy few) spends its time doing service-sector jobs which cannot be automated…

in the other the machines were owned by everyone so no-one was obliged to work in such jobs.

…but the jobs that cannot be automated will still exist, and people will still have to do them. In both these scenarios, we’ll still need human doctors, human teachers, human artists, human designers, human academics, etc. Whatever jobs you class as non-automatable will still need to be done.

All you’re proposing is a change in the ownership of the machines, so that in one future you’ve got a very small owner class of very rich people who don’t have to work, and in the other one you haven’t because the machines are owned in common. But, by definition, that won’t change the fact that the majority of people will be doing non-automatable jobs in either scenario.

I suppose in your dystopia there might be a few more openings for Decadent Nude Ballet Dancers and Ludicrously Elaborate Banquet Chefs and Obsequious Court Entertainers than in your common-ownership utopia but that’s hardly going to be a major sector of the economy. (And maybe the emancipated citizens of Utopia might quite like a ludicrous banquet from time to time too.)

I suggest another, more optimistic possibility, from the historical evolution of the post-industrial economy: people will go into discretionary, “life-enriching” services, like yoga instruction, cultural production, culinary services, which can provide quite good incomes.

Just as the industrial revolution freed up from farming to make more things beyond food, and enrich their lives materially as a result, so will robots free people from making things materially, to making experiences, thereby transcending material production. The economy of the future will have more DJ’s, yoga studios, professional trainers, counselors, Freudian analysts, or even “life gurus”; perhaps we will even have more poets and writers and artists and philosophers.

In a way, does this not reach almost the same “all-around human development” that Prof. Bertram wishes for? We might laugh at people who subscribe to New Age “life gurus,” but are they not just as valid a line of spiritual and overall development as any? Are not people who make regular visits to their Freudian psychologist (or Jungian, depending on personal preference) not improved and developed in an “all-round” way? Regular, well-supported training regimens are known to improve not just physical but also psychological conditions; are they thus not indeed “all-round human development?” Is the recent fad for cooking television not of that genre, too? Whereas people used to cook primarily for sustenance, now they now often cook for pleasure and aesthetic satisfaction, and this in fact has increased the sales of splashy cookbooks and gourmet ingredients and specialist cooking tools and other supporting products and services?

Have ye hope yet.

This is a pretty interesting issue, but I think more work needs to be done before we can even say whether leisure time has increased or decreased since 1970. There seems to be some disagreement on average worked hours alone, but mostly, as Worstal mentions, we need to add household work time to the equation. In general I think this will have gone down, even since 1970, but I am curious about certain issues like household help. On the one hand, a full-time nanny has gotten a lot more expensive. On the other, the 2-hour a week maid service has become much more common.

71: sorry, I don’t see how I can be clearer than by saying what I said:

“In both these scenarios, we’ll still need human doctors, human teachers, human artists, human designers, human academics, etc. Whatever jobs you class as non-automatable will still need to be done.
All you’re proposing is a change in the ownership of the machines, so that in one future you’ve got a very small owner class of very rich people who don’t have to work, and in the other one you haven’t because the machines are owned in common. But, by definition, that won’t change the fact that the majority of people will be doing non-automatable jobs in either scenario.”

And by adding that you are wrong to say that, if the machines were commonly owned, no one would be obliged to work in such jobs. They would, because an economy based on scarcity of non-automatable products and services would still exist.

I’m not saying that your dystopia and utopia are indistinguishable, or that one isn’t obviously preferable to the other; simply that the majority of people would do very similar jobs in each one, just as the majority of people in the USSR did jobs that people also did in the UK, despite the very different economic and social structures of the two countries.

The economy of the future will have more DJ’s, yoga studios, professional trainers, counselors, Freudian analysts, or even “life gurus”; perhaps we will even have more poets and writers and artists and philosophers.

It’ll be like a hippie commune, only you do it from 9 to 5 and for a wage, with performance reviews and occasional layoffs.

It’ll be like a hippie commune, only you do it from 9 to 5 and for a wage

And what’s wrong, exactly, with this? Is this better than wasting amongst industrial drudgery?

I think Chris will find, when he had achieved common ownership of the robots, or machines, or whatever, that they aren’t worth very much anymore, just as nobody in the West now much can be much bothered about the common ownership of agricultural land. I would be more than happy to let him have all the factories.

Reminds me of one of the things said about Japan; it looked like it had all the chips (in both the computer and figurative sense), but the chips turned out to be not worth that much in the end. All the while, that which we thought to be worthless, the software, turned to be the most valuable thing after all.

ajay:
“But probably not the same as the limit on how many they want to buy. If a suit costs you two months’ wages, you’ll have one. If it costs you, say, three days’ wages, you might have four or five.”
Yes I have also take economic 101. That doesn’t change the fact the eventually a new equilibrium is reached and that equilibrium may not employ the same number of people as the previous one. Which brings us back to the issue of what do to with these people who have suddenly become unemployed.

Ajay: well that’s rather like saying that in both a feudal society and an agrarian communitarian one most people are farmers, so there’s no difference.

To be honest, although there are considerable political benefits in terms of autonomy, and presumably one set of affairs would be associated with a better distribution of resources, the actual shit-shovelling is pretty similar. The difference I suppose would be that if resources were commonly owned, society could democratically agree to reduce working hours in some industries, but I bet this wouldn’t actually happen all that often.

83: put like that it sounds horrific. David Langford (I think) once remarked that Larry Niven’s books all predict that in the future everyone will be exactly like people in Southern California are now, and the worrying part is that Niven thinks this is a good thing.

The difference I suppose would be that if resources were commonly owned, society could democratically agree to reduce working hours in some industries, but I bet this wouldn’t actually happen all that often.

Resources wouldn’t be commonly owned, though: land, minerals etc would still be in private hands. All we’re postulating is a setup in which large chunks of manufacturing industry are a) unstaffed b) owned in common and c) extremely productive. Normal economics will continue in the rest of the system.

The fact that one of the mills is owned by Andrew Carnegie and the other one is owned by the people of the USSR really doesn’t alter that fact.

And it seems that conditions for the USSR steel mill worker were a fair bit worse, all in all. Spufford’s book has this factoid (from memory): the consequence of turning up late for work for the third time (in a row?) was a penal sentence for economic sabotage. As someone who turns up late for work every day, this really stings in the imagination.

I think the obvious point is that the prerequisite for an equitable sharing of the benefits of automation is vigorous democracy. Who, if anyone, gets to dictate terms and conditions of employment? Who gets to say how the automation is deployed? Who shapes the market environment in which all of this goes on? Where, if anywhere, do employees get the means and encouragement to develop skills, or retrain if necessary? Where, if anywhere, do employers get the means and encouragement to adopt better, liberating working practices?

92: ah, I see. OK, that sounds reasonable (with due caution surrounding the “I’m sure enough people would choose to work” thing as well as the definition of “needs”).

Resources wouldn’t be commonly owned, though: land, minerals etc would still be in private hands.

The usual justification for private ownership of firms is the need for incentives; in a hypothetical world where incentives are not needed, what’s the reason for private ownership of land and other natural resources? Or anything at all, for that matter.

If only.

The reason I am optimistic about this sort of thing is that the mother of one of my friends actually owns one of those new, specialist training gyms, and it’s actually a great business. They earn a nice upper-middle-class income, and it’s good, enjoyable, dignified work, helping people get fit and healthy in a comprehensive way. He even met his girlfriend through the gym! (his mother introduced her to him)

And to think that such an existence would have been largely impossible fifty years ago!

There is a tension in this thread between Myles view of the a post-materialistic future and Bertram’s and I think it ought to be addressed directly. I think the problem here is whether we are talking about a truly post-materialistic society enabled by robotic automation or a materialistic society driven by robotic automation. But I don’t think the latter vision makes much sense except under very specific circumstances. Unless we posit a shortage of energy or some fundamental material required for robotic production, you cannot get an economy that undermines the value of human labor in the production process while keeping the cost of material production high. Even if all the robots are controlled by an upper echelon, they will have to sell goods at lower and lower cost due to competition amongst themselves until it is possible to purchase all the material goods you wish on a Starbuck barista’s income. Myles’ vision is the only one that makes sense unless we take into account (real) potential problems like resource shortages. Otherwise, Myles’ robotic post-materialistic future is virtually inevitable and it is only the transition and health care costs that need to be managed.

‘and an ever-increasing number of indie bands’.

Oh great. So that’s what the future holds? An ever-increasing number of Coldplays and Travis’s? I think I’d rather have the boot stamping in the human face. At least that might be rhythmic.

In a society with a guaranteed basic income it might well be that no-one would need to labour in order to satisfy their needs [the bit you didn’t quote].

It looks like many people have a need to not be poorer than most of their acquaintances, and somewhat fewer people have a need to be richer than as many people as they can; can a basic income even theoretically do anything about this?

I think I’d rather have the boot stamping in the human face. At least that might be rhythmic.

Well, if you are down for that sort of thing, the experiential economy of the future might have that service available for an hourly fee. I think it’ll be located next door to the message therapist, to which you might schlep to after the face-stamping experience, much like one goes through a Turkish bath.

If you want to imagine the future, imagine a hipster watching a Bon Iver concert on an iPad in an independent coffee shop FOREVER.

“If you want to imagine the future, imagine a hipster watching a Bon Iver concert on an iPad in an independent coffee shop FOREVER.”

My. God.

But if a machine alone can do your job more efficiently than you can, then you won’t be able to do that: you’ll be out of a job. Inventing automatic telephone exchanges doesn’t mean that you have lots of part-time telephone operators learning the cello. It means you have lots of unemployed telephone operators. This, I think, is what Krugman is talking about.

Conclusion: in the grimleisure-filled future of robotic laborers, not everyone need have a job. If it really is true that there just isn’t that much work that needs to be performed by people, what’s the problem?

Myles’ vision is not post-materialistic; it’s based on market exchange of services. It’s very much materialistic.

If you choose to define post-materialism as the elimination of all markets for goods and services, sure. What we are hypothesizing, however, is a substantial reduction in the cost of material goods so they are not a significant part of the economy. If your utopia requires the elimination of markets, sure, robots aren’t going to get you there. But the distopia of robots producing goods that nobody but a few can afford because of joblessness… that doesn’t make any sense.

Mpowell, well, my idea of a post-materialistic vision is the one where there is no economy. Gurus, prostitutes, and indie bands do their things voluntarily, simply because they like doing it.

mpowell: that doesn’t make any sense

Why not? Why can’t there be a huge underclass/surplus population /reserve army of the unemployed alongside the regular economy, like the current global population of slum-dwellers? Why won’t the regular economy be two-tiered, producing vast amounts of cheap junk for the underclass and luxury goods for the global overclass?

@ 117.

“If you are going to allow for reduction of nonmonetized costs (personal domestic labour) as a value-addition (and that is after all what a useful innovation like a better boiler also presents, because it lets you save time and energy to do something else: you are reducing opportunity costs) then you ought to include those same improvements in the calculations about government spending, too.”

Sure, entirely happy to do so. As long as, of course, we are allowed to study opportunity costs in what government insists that we do. Like, you know, recycling and stuff. Opportunity costs are, after all, opportunity costs.

“Failing at social one-upmanship won’t kill you. ”

Well, doesn’t that just kill the entire idea of relative poverty?

@Kieran Healy
It might work if the Habilitations link the recipients into the Singularity.

Failing at social one-upmanship won’t kill you.

Actually, it can.

On the other hand, social one-upmanship might provide motivation to work in a post-scarcity-of-essentials society.

Basically, we’ll not need to work to get food or clothing or shelter, but we’ll all want to join Contact or better still Special Circumstances because of the social status and excitement it offers.

Hmm. Given what those institutions correspond to in present-day society, I’m not sure that’s a positive development.

Uhm… tendency of the rate of profit to fall anyone? Seems pertinent to the discussion.

Well, only if you think it actually exists.

But we’ll never reach a post-scarcity-of-essentials society if robot owners consider larger robot-built yachts for robot owners a higher priority than more robot-made food, clothing, housing, etc. for non-robot-owners.

What you are assuming is a high concentration of wealth, more than anything else. But if material goods are cheap in real terms (because robots can make them easily and robots make more robots, etc), then owning a bunch of robots will not make anyone super rich. They would have to be super rich for different reasons.

Let me add that we are very far from this kind of world, however. The world productivity in the US is not high enough to provide all the material goods that everyone here could reasonably want. And 3/4 of the world’s population is even further away. In my view, the optimistic part of this view is that the needed productivity levels will ever be attained, not the consequences if they can be.

Myles,
The paper mills were profitable before they introduced the labor saving, which is to say job destroying, machines. The reason that part of Wisconsin has so many paper mills doesn’t have anything to do with a planned economy; it has to do with the proximity to lumber and water power.

Does a first-order source of information have to be accurate enough for prediction? If so, then there will also be cases in which there is really no such thing as a first-order source, because the evil that you have preference to avoid is a disaster which can never be precisely predicted, probably not even statistically predicted, because it is disaster in a complex system like the climate system.

This saving — the saving on time that is spent worrying about the risks of the incalculable or unknowable — has personal utility value. It is regularly welcomed by 50-100% of the people, depending on the specific topic in social or environmental welfare: whether it is protecting retirement security, bailing-out the system of bank accounts in a financial crisis, avoiding a climate disaster, having the strongest military, helping the poor, having universal healthcare, etc. The avoidance of future disaster by providing for each of these things counts as incalculable savings in the personal use of time and energy.

If the robots don’t need us for anything, then we’d better just hope they’re not smart enough to realize that—because in that case they’re a slave class.

Dude, you can’t subscribe to both the Singularity and to belief in limits to post-material economic growth. Pick one and stick with it.

Why won’t the regular economy be two-tiered, producing vast amounts of cheap junk for the underclass and luxury goods for the global overclass?

The regular economy won’t be relying on the production of goods. You are presuming that a $3000 Eames chair is a good in the conventional sense, when in fact $300 of it at most is a “good” and $2700 of it is a “service” or “experience”. When the Eames chair was originally invented, it was the other way around. Whether or not a robot makes the Eames chair is absolutely inconsequential; the $2700 in “experience” is being produced by a person or multiple persons, and it’s being paid out to armies upon armies of marketing departments, advertising agencies, corporate PR departments, accountants, lawyers, splashy magazines, corporate sponsorship, nonprofit foundations, what have you. And the advertising and marketing executives and PR spokespersons and accountants and lawyers in turn pay out their salaries to trainers and music lessons and ballet studios and realtors and art dealers and art teachers and neighbourhood baristas and so on.

We are, whether or not we admit it, engaging in a post-materialist economy. Every time you buy a Apple device you are engaging in a post-materialist economy. How much do you reckon Apple spends on advertising campaigns?

chris @ 42:

Thanks for re-inventing the wheel!

“Unaffected”- I was correcting a misspelling/solecism when I dropped the prefix.

If robots start making most end-products then robot-making itself is going to be a key cost. The obvious competitive advantage: have robots make the robots that make the end-products.

But once machines reproduce machines the industrial capitalist has painted himself into a corner. There’s enough sunlight, water, and/or wind and rocks in any nation to set up another robot-reproduction facility with local energy and materials. At most you have 20-something years for the good times to roll until the patents expire and everyone on Earth has maker-bots produced at minimal marginal cost by other maker-bots. But people probably won’t even wait that long if the global manufacturing economy becomes robot dominated: unlicensed copies of physical goods will become as common as unlicensed music and software copies are today.

‘(Spoiler: nothing at all. It’s the result of a discovery that it’s almost as cheap to give people makework jobs as it would be to keep them unemployed and drawing on the DHSS, and it conceals the true size of the British unemployment problem, thus preserving business confidence and the government in power.)’

Did anyone ask Keith Waterhouse what he thought of the situation now that his prediction has come true?

Tim, I derive disutility from the fact that the government prevents robbers from stealing all of your possessions. Should we take that into account too?

Did anyone ask Keith Waterhouse what he thought of the situation now that his prediction has come true?

It hasn’t come true. Secretly-nationalised companies with the sole mission of providing unproductive jobs to the otherwise unemployed?

(Also, Keith Waterhouse RIP since 2008 or so, so you can ask him but you won’t get much of an answer.)

“It hasn’t come true. Secretly-nationalised companies with the sole mission of providing unproductive jobs to the otherwise unemployed?”

Well, we do actually have, to my vast amusement, an advisor to the TUC stating exactly this. That since, given the benefits system, employing civil servants costs about the same as not employing them, therefore there should be no cuts at all in the number of civil servants.

# 153.

Quite.

Although what the bankers do is much worse than merely digging a hole and then filling it in. Intellectually speaking, what the bankers do is more the equivalent of digging a hole, shooting lots of people, robbing them, putting the bodies in the hole, and then persuading central government to reimburse the cost of the bullets and providing the bankers with financial recompense for the emotional distress the whole experience has caused them.

And then filling in the hole.

@142-144: Uh, thanks for sneering in all directions while contributing absolutely nothing of substance, I guess.

Which is why we have laws that insist that you must recycle. To force those who don’t gain utility from doing it to do it.

We do? I didn’t know that. Maybe I’d better look out or the Recycling Police will get me. (Or, who is “we” exactly, in this sentence?)

Tim Worstall #149: “Sure, and many do not.”

But (1) they are outnumbered, and (2) their disutility is restricted to the greater price of the product, and not the additional transaction costs in determining the environmental friendliness of the product.

“So, when we look at the costs of government regulations insisting upon recycling we must measure both the utility not gained by those who would do it anyway and the disutility of those who would prefer not to do it.”

Almost all of those who would do it anyway are still gaining the utility. (That is why they pushed for, and were successful in achieving, the legislation.) Of course, those measures should also be included in the calculation.

“Which is why we have laws that insist that you must recycle. To force those who don’t gain utility from doing it to do it.”

We have the laws because you are outnumbered. But I would agree, if you also include the business firms that started to pay attention to the environment and to examine their entire production cycles.

161: well, yes and no: we do sort of have backdoor-nationalised companies, certainly – not just the ones that are part-owned by the state, but all the other ones that are heavily supported by the state – but I don’t think anyone’s suggested that we bailed them out to prevent the damaging social consequences of all their staff becoming unemployed.

We do, of course, bail out BAE Systems by, say, ordering overpriced helicopters in order to prevent threatened redundancies in Yeovil, but that’s not so much an act of social policy as a surrender to successful blackmail.

That’s the point you got from the schmoo story? (I thought everyone knew the point is that we have to preserve the environment

That is just baffling.

The only possibly relevant SF story I remember had jet-age scientists complaining about the number of conferences they had to attend. It turned out these were planned by the aliens, and their purpose was to prevent the scientists from getting anything done.

Obligatory Pratchett – the Patrician musing about the superiority of committees as a mechanism for suppressing dissenting voices. Better than the Iron Maiden, because less messy, and people actually volunteer to enter committees.
(The only drawback was the expense of tea and biscuits halfway through, which was rarely necessary with the Iron Maiden.)

because the British government doesn’t prop up Boeing’s UK operations by buying overpriced British-built kit.

My reason for not opposing the propping up of BAE is my distaste for anyone (in this case, the Americans) trying to corner the market, which was more or less the intention of the F-35 international participation program. If BAE manages to prevent this market being cornered by suppliers from a single country, I say, carry on.

I very much doubt that one would be paying less for arms when the NATO arms market has been cornered.

I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a statement.

I would want the Canadian government to behave similarly.

As a fellow Canadian: the Canadian policy in this respect has been more or less a complete farce. “Buying Canadian” has meant contributing toward the F-35 subsidy without getting any of the goodies. It has also meant being locked into American fighter aircraft at extortionate prices without possibility of buying from alternative vendors (such as Eurofighter or Dassault).

I think it is amazing that people are surprised that an American company got a contract from the American government to supply equipment for the American military.

The Americans insisted that this was going to be a fair process, with no consideration of national champions. The USAF, for its own part, preferred Airbus. If the bidding process had been sound it would have set an formidable precedent in market-based public procurement.

Myles:
“As a fellow Canadian: the Canadian policy in this respect has been more or less a complete farce. “Buying Canadian” has meant contributing toward the F-35 subsidy without getting any of the goodies. It has also meant being locked into American fighter aircraft at extortionate prices without possibility of buying from alternative vendors (such as Eurofighter or Dassault).”

Did anything in my comment lead you to believe I disagree? I said I would want the Canadian government to look first to Canadian companies, not that I think they are currently doing so.

“The Americans insisted that this was going to be a fair process, with no consideration of national champions. The USAF, for its own part, preferred Airbus. If the bidding process had been sound it would have set an formidable precedent in market-based public procurement.”

I do not believe that a completely marked-based public procurement process is a good thing and I am no longer at all surprised that the US government lies about what it is going to do.

Maybe I’m missing something in the time worked argument. I’m sure people who work are working longer hours, but there’s also been a huge increase in the amount of lifespan spent in retirement. Surely that counts?

“Instead of mass unemployment or horrendous inequality, technological improvement could reduce the time people spend working to meet their needs and give them more free time. Free time that they could use for other purposes (such as their all-round human development).”

What do you mean by needs? If you’re living hand to mouth and just aspire to pay your rent this week, clothe and feed yourself, etc I can see this working. But practically, people have needs which involve finance costs – like paying off a mortgage or building up a pension – which if you want to meet these needs then sitting on your hands for half the week isn’t good advice.

But practically, people have needs which involve finance costs

It would be a reasonable societal goal to reduce such needs as much as possible. For example, folks shouldn’t need to work extra for a pension, because society can and should provide adequate means for retirement. Personal pensions (compared to e.g. social security) derived from working more and saving more aggregate to a drag on the economy during lean times (when the paradox of thrift applies) and an inefficient allocation of resources during boom times (pension investors need to be more risk-averse and conservative than the norm, to account for the greater risk involved in losing one’s retirement fund, and thus will be less responsive to upticks in economic growth than the norm).

It’s also unclear why taking on long-term debt in order to sustain one’s living condition (mortgage) ought to be the norm (instead of e.g. renting). In general, one takes on long-term debt in order either to make purchases one can’t do without [needs], or to make optional purchases one is willing to pay a long-term premium for [wants]. In the case of debt-financed needs, it would be sensible to marshal technology to reduce those needs (e.g. more efficient mass transit replacing one’s need for a car in a city).

You have a good point when you bring up mortgages, but it’s not clear to me whether the average person would prefer “spend thirty percent of my income on the mortgage for forty years, with lots of leisure time” to “spend forty percent of my income on the mortgage for twenty-five years to pay it off faster, with much less leisure time.” The latter case may be more the norm, but in the absence of the former option that norm can’t be interpreted as evidence for a typical preference.

Salient: “It’s also unclear why taking on long-term debt in order to sustain one’s living condition (mortgage) ought to be the norm (instead of e.g. renting).”

Because:
(1) Most people like to have some level of control over their living space. They don’t want to have to beg someone else’s permission to paint the walls, put in a different light fixture, etc.
(2) Most people want to believe that the money they’re paying for their house will eventually benefit them (as owners), and not someone else. Renting is pouring money down an endless rat hole. If you own a house and prices take a nosedive, you can mail the keys to the bank and walk away. If you rent and housing prices go up, you’re screwed.
(3) Most landlords are scum. They tend to be failed, bitter small businessmen who couldn’t make it in other endeavors. They pinch pennies and argue about *everything*. And they all think it’s a way to get rich quick.

Chris:
I would argue that it would result in the exact opposite as countries would purchase arms from domestic suppliers even if it would be a bit cheaper to purchase from an american supplier.

I would argue that it would result in the exact opposite as countries would purchase arms from domestic suppliers even if it would be a bit cheaper to purchase from an american supplier.

It’s literally impossible for non-American countries to attain the economies of scale necessary for most domestic weapons. Everybody can produce rifles, but rifles aren’t really the big defence item here. Even the pan-European arms projects are perpetually on the brink of collapse. If the Americans had insisted on an American jump jet, the Harrier would have died a lot sooner; if everybody wanted to build their own tanks European armies would be paying high-than-JSDF prices for tanks (Japan paid F-15 prices for a enlarged, underpowered F-16 copy); if everybody wanted to build their own submarines they would all end up like HMCS Chicoutimi (ex-RN Upholder, renaming ships incredibly unlucky and pisses off Poseidon).

This is the sort of thing that makes me hopeless about Canadian public policy: no, Canada is not a continental-sized economy, and it is not capable of the things the U.S. economic and industrial base is capable of. Canada’s hope is comparative advantage.

(2) Most people want to believe that the money they’re paying for their house will eventually benefit them (as owners), and not someone else.

Well, sure they *believe* that, but they’re deluded. For most of the term, they’re mostly paying interest, which benefits someone else. Furthermore, as owners, they bear the costs of maintenance and depreciation and the risks of faster-than-average loss of value, which can destroy their “paying to eventually benefit themselves” in rather a hurry.

Renting is pouring money down an endless rat hole.

Well, you have to live somewhere. That’s going to cost you, one way or another. Maintaining a dwelling place is a form of continuous consumption; mixing it with an investment (let alone a leveraged one, which is what a mortgage is) makes you highly likely to confuse yourself about how much of that money you are really ever going to see again.

Even if you could save up to the point of buying a house outright, and so avoid interest, you’d still have to pay the taxes and maintenance on a house whose value *as a building* would probably be diminishing as the technology embedded in it becomes obsolete (although the land it is on might rise in value).

If you own a house and prices take a nosedive, you can mail the keys to the bank and walk away.

Only in some states, and even then, (a) whatever equity you *did* manage to build up with all those years of paying a few hundred dollars more a month than comparable rent plus doing all your own maintenance is now gone, and (b) good luck finding your next place to live.

If you rent and housing prices go up, you’re screwed.

If housing prices go up faster than wages, everyone is screwed one way or another.

You leave out “if you rent and termites are discovered in the foundation, you can move”, and similar scenarios. (Including “if you rent and find a new job opportunity 50 miles away”.) Of course that kind of one-sided view will make ownership look better than it is.

Free time that they could use for other purposes (such as their all-round human development)

Or contemplating, and lamenting the loss of, the prosperity their parents and grandparents enjoyed.

Just a thought on the housing/debt thing talked about in Salient and Josh’s posts …I recently was talking to a professor of mine from Switzerland, and she mentioned that some Euro. countries have roughly 20-80 ratios of renters vs. homeowners. I think the whole U.S. and housing-fetish thing has clearly been influenced by our culture and gov’t (for better or worse), and obviously taking on huge amounts of personal debt is not endemic to the human condition but is a fairly recent phenomenon. I know incentives are very tricky when they run counter to cultural standards but I wonder if there isn’t a way to convince people to rent. I’m skeptical of arguments like Josh’s that suggest that people inherently prefer houses with 30 year mortgages to apartments but being relatively debt free.

Chris Bertram,
I thought that I would just mention why I am critical of GA Cohen’s work. We can have an honest debate about it; there was an interesting and rigorous criticism of Cohen’s recent moral and political philosophy by Julius Sensat in the Journal of European Philosophy.

But here are some critical questions in regards to his theory of history book.

1. His definition of relations of production is so formal that he can’t follow Godelier in seeing how kinship, politics and religion can at times serve as relations of production. In fact I don’t think he discusses Godelier at all. Derek Sayer draws on his work in his criticism of Cohen.

2. His discussion of the Asiatic Mode of Production is terribly impoverished as compared to the work of, say, Brendan O’Leary. We can’t just make marginal such an important topic. Cohen was unbelievably Eurocentric.

3. When he comes to understanding the dynamics of capitalism itself, he develops no coherent theory of crisis and the limits of the mixed economy.

Yet in spite of such obvious limits and flaws in his work he became the dominant interpreter of Marx in the Anglo American academy. I would say that even Elster had less influence on the interpretation of Marx.