Does America Really Need More Jobs?

[Cryptoman]

This is a really good video on the future of jobs and work.  Douglas Rushkoff presents his view of where we're going economically and why corporations and the federal government won't be able to help us much in the future.  He talks a lot about local, peer-to-peer economic activity and local currencies.  He doesn't specifically mention Bitcoin, but I think a combination of Bitcoin, Open Transactions and Ripple could really enable his vision of the future.

http://online.wsj.com/video/does-america-really-need-more-jobs/E49FDEC2-1596-4A1B-970D-486CBDF1FE5C.html

[ampirebus]

This is a really good video on the future of jobs and work.  Douglas Rushkoff presents his view of where we're going economically and why corporations and the federal government won't be able to help us much in the future.  He talks a lot about local, peer-to-peer economic activity and local currencies.  He doesn't specifically mention Bitcoin, but I think a combination of Bitcoin, Open Transactions and Ripple could really enable his vision of the future.

http://online.wsj.com/video/does-america-really-need-more-jobs/E49FDEC2-1596-4A1B-970D-486CBDF1FE5C.html

i take this one step further, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFVz6TXSN0U

"saint douglas rushkoff explains why you should quit your job and exchange things of value and love with your community" (church of stop shopping NYC Earthalujah

[johnyj]

Money unfairly benefit the banks, but it is also works as a benchmark to the value of goods

[neptop]

And as we all know benchmarks are flawed.

No, seriously... the problem with the benchmarking is that values aren't something defined. Take bread for example. It can be worthless, because you don't like it and live saving, because it prevents you from starving. I don't think there are really more extreme differences, yet this is true for a lot of things. Also there are a lot of things that are more or less impossible to value. Oh and there are markets that are mostly based on psychology. In general things are a lot about imagination, which makes sense, because the world is based on what the people's brains imagine.

These things are interesting, because it makes markets, values, etc. perfectly valid, reasonable and add lots of logic, while it is still imagination. It's similar to persons playing any kind of games. There are rules and you can analyze stuff. You can program a computer to play again, you can create theories, find paradoxes and explore everything (has been done with all kind of games) while still being pure imagination. This is something a lot of philosophers have been interested in. The fact that everything is pretty much an interpretation/imagination of data that your sensory organs provide to you brain (but you can't even know that for sure) has even lead to the question for existence and the famous "Cogito ergo sum" by Rene Decartes, who was a mathematician btw.

So a lot of things can and should be questioned. The fact that something is in a certain way doesn't necessarily mean it has to be that way. Also the theory determinism was (possibly!) wakened by quantum physics.

[Crypt_Current]

The fact that something is in a certain way doesn't necessarily mean it has to be that way.

+1

[neptop]

Reminds me of these:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QNwkR4HU8Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07-cpKE9bUw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eim4cpBmShA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsH1atj4Tsg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lBIETTmSXU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2P0k0Z2oLG4

Same stuff in a more serious theme:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z9WVZddH9w

[johnyj]

The most obvious reason that money exists is because it is very simple to use and understand, and most of the people prefer simple things at the first place. Just like computer, no matter how many times you tell most of the people that command line is much more powerful, they will still prefer a mouse and GUI

[Anonymous]

The most obvious reason that money exists is because it is very simple to use and understand, and most of the people prefer simple things at the first place. Just like computer, no matter how many times you tell most of the people that command line is much more powerful, they will still prefer a mouse and GUI

The analogy falls apart when barter really isn't that much more powerful. It takes more time to get desires met. Massive value is lost in inefficiency. The command-line can be efficient and powerful.

[Anonymous]

I blame the bailed out industries and the destruction of savings by the government.

[MoonShadow]

I can't watch this video, but if the general argument is that a "job" is a daily defined working arrangment with a legally established company, then the answer to the question posed in the title is "no".

The official metrics are flawed, in many notable ways.  But significantly in error as the "unoffical" grey market increases in relative size.  This has been the trend since the commercial explosion of the Internet since 1992.  For example, many people for the past decade or so have made a part time job out of Ebay dealings.  A minority of these people have lost their "offical" jobs in the recent recession, and are thus offically unemployed.  But if your side job was selling locally made knick-knacks on Ebay prior to the pink slip, what would you do?  I live in a city that has a local artist industry centered around glass, but for the most part the artists themselves don't sell their art on the Internet.  Several fans have filled that niche over the past several years, and I'd bet that more than a few have made a full time income out of their hobby. 

Another example is my nephew.  He recently turned 18, and like many his age have trouble finding "offical" work because they have to compete for those entry level labor jobs with older and more experienced adults who were laid off from higher skilled jobs.  That is not to say that he doesn't work.  He takes one off labor jobs from myself, neighbors, and strangers via a website called Taskrabbit.  It's not as easy or dependable as an "official" job, and he would prefer a regular scheduled job, as there are many advantages; but he doesn't go hungry and he manages to earn enough to pay for the things that he really wants, such as gas in his car, insurance, cell service and bowling fees.

[tsvekric]

I blame technological advancement.
We live in an age where most people in 1st world countries do not work in a job that we 'need' to survive.  All of you on here who have jobs, think about what you do and how important you are in society.  Think about how few people it takes to do the core activities in everyday life that keep us alive: agriculture, sanitation, construction, manufacturing industry, medical, etc... the only necessary field that continues to grow is medicine/health care and this only because we keep ourselves alive so long - yet even medical business still is facing certain areas of employment obsolescence.

I'm probably one of the few on here that believe, although I consider myself a form of a libertarian, that the age of working for income in a market system is coming to an end.  Up to 25% of all US citizens who could be employed are not, and its certainly not for lack of trying.  Sure, the debt system we've created along with regulations and market distortions affect employment, but no way can we deny that we are innovating ourselves out of a job.  Just think about what a college degree gets you today (or what not having a college degree gets you today, on average).

When it is impossible for a significant portion of our population to find a job, where do they get money?

Imagine the extreme: A small population somehow becomes so efficient that it is almost completely automated to the point that all jobs - agriculture/service/medical/technical/managerial whatever - are all done by less than 1% of the population.  What do the other 99% do for money?

Obviously that won't happen, but there is some point between full employment and this that we are at now.
Think of every piece of technology/innovation creating and replacing jobs.  You create a deep-frier/burger-flipping machine that replaces 10 fast food workers and creates jobs for 1 technician to service it and on average 2 innovators/managers working for the corporation that sells it somewhere along the line.  That 'creates' 3 new jobs and 'replaces' 10 on average for every machine made.  We're net -7 jobs for every machine.  You can try and justify where jobs will be created along the line from those corporate managers/technicians/etc but in the end it is not zero-sum.  Jobs are lost and are lost to the lowest sector.  
We're well past the breaking point where this replacement breaks even in the economy.  Wages for work seem like an outdated idea, suddenly.  I have no idea what the alternative is.

[Anonymous]

Machines actually create wealth and make things less expensive in society and free up innovation to fill more desires. As long as people want something, there will be jobs to fill. That also answers the question, "What do 99% of people do if 1% maintain the machines?" Well, first of all, they have to sustain the machines by having them fill their desires. You've created a paradox where you think everyone would die because they somehow are forced to buy from machines. It would balance out and in the end, in such a world, goods would be nearly free. It would be a post-scarcity situation. Very utopic actually.

Anyways,the only reason there is unemployment now is because nearly all of society's savings have been destroyed by government and there is nothing to feed innovation.

[tsvekric]

The official metrics are flawed, in many notable ways. 

Most notable in that by definition they exclude many people who are unemployed but for the sake of official 'unemployment' are not.  Our definition for 'unemployment' becomes more strict - excluding more people - so that in reality 10% reported unemployment is really closer to 20+% unemployed in the population - those actually able to work but are not employed.

Your examples are trivial - the types of income/employment that you list have always been in existence, they just take a different form these days thanks to computers.  Freelance income still is reported to the government - its not like officials and economists are blind to the fact that people sell shit on ebay.

[tsvekric]

Machines actually create wealth and make things less expensive in society and free up innovation to fill more desires. As long as people want something, there will be jobs to fill. That also answers the question, "What do 99% of people do if 1% maintain the machines?" Well, first of all, they have to sustain the machines by having them fill their desires. You've created a paradox where you think everyone would die because they somehow are forced to buy from machines. It would balance out and in the end, in such a world, goods would be nearly free. It would be a post-scarcity situation. Very utopic actually.

Anyways,the only reason there is unemployment now is because nearly all of society's savings have been destroyed by government and there is nothing to feed innovation.

That first sentence made me go a little 
What you say is not universally true.  It is true that we find jobs in other areas when one starts to become obsolete - that is why the service sector grows in post-industrialized society.
Without government intervention, yes, people can always find a job.  Lift the minimum wage and everyone could find a job - but the disparity in income would be so huge that it would hardly matter.  I'm no fan of the minimum wage, but the way our society has structured itself it is completely unrealistic to think that we could ever have a situation where everyone works, has a job, a house, and is happy and safe.  THAT is utopic.  What you will have instead is the spread of becoming heavily weighted to one side, spreading thinner and thinner for those unlucky enough to be the least desirable for jobs. 
Would I pay someone $1/hr to clean my messy room?  Sure.  Is that a job?  Sure.  Is that fair and reasonable solution to the 20%+ of the population without jobs? 

You can blame the FED, corporatism, the welfare state, regulation, whatever you want, but in the end there is something else that is driving this disparity, something naturally occurring in a market situation.  The question is what to do about it.

[Anonymous]

Your idea of income disparity has never found a place in reality.

Do you think the person who would work to clean your room for a dollar an hour has a better place in society right now? Think about what you are saying for a second.

[BubbleBoy]

The guy in the video is all buzzwords and feelgood and no actual economic clue. Hey, it's not like that ever stopped anyone from writing public policy.

One of the schemes he's suggesting, where a website tracks everybody's skills and express them in time-dollars is basically a disguised form of communism, the notion that everyone has equal rights to the economic outputs of the society regardless of his contribution. By fixing an hour of baby-sitting to equal an hour of computer programming you can pretty much guarantee no programming services will be available on the market, just a glut of baby-sitting, garden-mowing and grocery-buying offers. Scarcity is the natural effect of intervention in the process of price discovery - the undervalued good or service is sold on the parallel or black market.

For the sake of argument, let's assume the townspeople reach an agreement on an "unit of account" to be used, and devise a pricing scheme that everybody accepts as fair (yeah, right), for example 100 points = 1 hour of accounting by a CPA = 5 hours of baby sitting = 2 hours electrical work. Well then, when all townspeople enter their service offers in the web interface, the server will only be able to do crude barter matches - since nobody has done any work everybody has a big fat zero points in his account, there's no purchasing power.

To move beyond barter to an actual economy you need to inject liquidity in the market via two main mechanisms:
 - some trusted entity is able to spend points into existence for example the City Hall or a community charity
 - accounts are allowed to have negative balances, effectively a credit facility

Does all this sound familiar ? Well it should, since it's exactly what the government (via bond issuance) and the Fed (via QE) are doing. So we have free prices and a fiat currency - the exact same way the real economic system works. A fat lot of good did that do !

[MoonShadow]

Your examples are trivial - the types of income/employment that you list have always been in existence, they just take a different form these days thanks to computers.

Trivial to whom?  They are not trivial to those who engage in free agency in order to earn an income.  And the addition of the Internet into the mix ultimately only makes free agency more efficient, otherwise it wouldn't happen.  Higher efficiency and effectiveness in the realm of using the Internet to match up individual desires with individuals willing to fill those desires (be it shippable products, or personal labor services) only increases the market share that free agency can effectively provide.  In the beginning, the new 'TaskRabbit' type people who can make a real living will be rare and annecdotal, but over time those jobs will increase with the increasing public awareness that such a system can satisfy their needs in less expensive or less frustrating ways than are presently possible.  A decade ago, anyone making a living from home via the Internet who wasn't an accomplished author was a news article.  Today most people know someone who does or could make a living solely from home via the Internet.  Craigslist is another example of the improvement of efficiency of the Internet altering an existing market, resulting in it's massive expansion compared to the prior model.  In the case of Craigslist, the local market of used goods is what changed.  Not only did Craigslist improve the advertising of yard sales, it permitted sellers of single used items to avoid the need for a yard sale or the purchase of a classified ad in a local newspaper.  Thus allowing those people looking for a deal on a used item that is impractical to ship (think used refrigerator) to find sellers locally.  I have an android app that scans Craigslist for me, looking for items that match keywords, so that I can be quick to reply to any such ad that I should be interested it within a few minutes.  I know that I'm not the only person to use such a thing, because I've been beaten to the item by a matter of minutes in the past.  Search Craigslist for refrigerators and you will find a number of ads that ask too much for what they are selling, because the good deals are claimed quickly and those ads are removed.

  Freelance income still is reported to the government - its not like officials and economists are blind to the fact that people sell shit on ebay.

Sure, they are aware that stuff sells on Ebay, but that is only an example.  The second hand market is legally taxable, but let me know if you find anyone who sells stuff on Craigslist in November that will even consider reporting that to the IRS come April, assuming that they even remember the transaction while sitting down to do their tax forms.  If there wasn't a check or a credit transaction involved, something I would presume to be very rare with regard to Craigslist transactions, then it didn't happen as far as the IRS will ever know.  It's only because of the third party issue that Ebay transactions are more likely to be reported and taxed.  This is the killer consumer app for Bitcoin anyway.  Whether or not Bitcoin is used in a manner intended to be anonymous by both parties, it's going to be a lot of work for a agent to tie a particular transaction to a taxable event even after identifying both parties to a BTC transfer.

[MoonShadow]

You can blame the FED, corporatism, the welfare state, regulation, whatever you want, but in the end there is something else that is driving this disparity, something naturally occurring in a market situation. 

You assume that the 'something' is a naturally occurring force in a market situation, but you can't offer any evidence to support that.  You can't, because it's not true, and it's provablely not true.  The 'something' that is driving disparity presently isn't a naturally free market mechanism, but the long predicted side effects of intervention into the free market.  It's just taken this long to accumulate to the current crisis.  I can actually support this premise, but I don't have the time and you wouldn't likely accept it anyway, so take the above however you wish.

[MoonShadow]

Machines actually create wealth and make things less expensive in society and free up innovation to fill more desires.

This is dead on correct.  By hindsight, we now know that the most important change in society that led to the equal rights of women was not the Women's Sufferage movement.  It was the invention of the automatic washing machine.

Those who are wealthy enough to afford a maid to clean their homes pay them because they favor their free time over their money.  The maid cleans the home because they favor the money over the free time.  It's a difference in wants and values.  The wealthy don't value money as much as the poor, because they have more than enough to satisfy their primal needs.  Thus they are willing to pay the poor woman to be their maid.  So who benefits most from the advancements in consumer technology?  The middle class and the poor.  Because of the inventions of washing machines, vacuums and automatic dishwashers; both middle class housewives and those nearly destitute maids of the rich are better off then their predecessors a few generations ago.  If a man is wealthy enough, he didn't have to labor to meet his own needs even back in Roman times, since he just had to hire more servants (or by more slaves).  The modern maid, however, directly benefits from the effectiveness of labor saving devices designed for the American middle class homemaker.  Because of a washing machine, the maid does not need to commit so much time or personal effort into the washing of clothes.  Because of the Roomba, she might be able to vacuum personally in one room while the robot vacuums in the next room; so that the maid only need to check the robot's work and finish up the details.  To sum it up, machines don't actually displace workers unless you are looking at a particular subset of work.  Before the machines, the maid did the work while her employer (or a manager) surveyed the results.  Now the maid has taken over much of the tasks of the manager, while the machines do much of the labor.  Thus she is more productive overall, and can earn more money (by doing the same work that would have required many more maids two generations ago, perhaps by freelancing and cleaning a different client's home each day of the week rather than laboring all day every day for one rich guy) while her employer benefits from lower labor costs as well.  This doesn't actually remove jobs, because although there is less need for professional maids, the rich man still has other unmet desires.  For example, since he doesn't have to pay two maids because one is enough, now he also hires a gardener (or a landscaping company, same principle) so that he doesn't have to worry about the yard work either.  Or a poolman.  Or he buys a home theater, which employs not just engineers to design the thing, but also those factory workers; who now rather than standing on an assembly line driving two screws into the product 1000 times each workday monitors three or four screw driving robots.  Now he is an 'operator', or a 'tech'.  So the employee makes more money, performing a less (physically) demanding task; while the consumer gets an improved product at a more affordable cost.

Literally everyone in society benefits from the improvements in productivity that automation provides, from the wealthiest industrialist down to the unemployed drunkard whose beer costs half as much because the brewing process is now controlled by a computer rather than a trained brewmaster.

[neptop]

The only real problem appears to be energy. It is a bit like a currency (well, it is in the science fiction genre). It isn't just the availability of automation. Sometimes machines even get replaced by people, because they are cheaper and from an economic POV there is more supply than demand.

So if you want to make things better that's probably your best bet. Without wanting to go into conspiracy theories it is clear that a lot of people who benefit from a low supply and high demand of energy fear to loose power (money). I don't even think this fear is valid, because if the whole society that profits it's usually better for them, because it means new technologies (entertainment, medical, ...), more automation, more free time, etc.

It would be an important step to start investing resources into the future of energy supply. There are MANY serious projects that could potentially "solve" (create a MUCH bigger supply) the problem. Japan for example contracted a company for solar-based solar power. There are multiple companies waiting for first deployments of their technology. Also there are way more serious projects for wind power, that are ready to be deployed. Not just these ineffective (land and offshore) wind farms. Than there many different ways to use waves, the difference of pressure, temperature, ... in the depths of the ocean. The wind and partially the shore based power plants also have the huge benefit of not requiring a lot of maintenance. They work pretty much without anyone caring. All these projects are real and are offered at trade shows, so I don't really understand why no country invests into these things. I mean if just one of them can be successfully deployed it this will be a huge improvement for countries - in many ways.