Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

The lights are all blinking red.

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

Donald Trump, welcome to your everything, everywhere, all at once.

Come on, man.

People are weird.

We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

The fight for our country is always worth it. ~Kamala Harris

It looks like winning debates is a black job!

If you thought you’d already seen people saying the stupidest things possible on the internet, prepare yourselves.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

Wake up. Grow up. Get in the fight.

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

You can’t love your country only when you win.

The US Supreme Court is on the ballot in november.

Celebrate the fucking wins.

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

The current Supreme Court is a rogue court. Very dangerous.

Every reporter and pundit should have to declare if they ever vacationed with a billionaire.

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Reader Interactions

232Comments

  1. 1.

    Punchy

    So is that actually the robot saying these things, or just a voiceover on the video? Doesn’t sound robotic enough. If it’s the former, the robot isn’t programmed to respond like that, right? That would be a guy saying those things into a mic and out of the robot’s speaker in real time, right?

    Yours-
    Robot ignoramus

  4. 4.

    Paul in KY

    Amazing piece of technology (the robot, whether it actually swears or not). Just wonder about the future real world implications of having these things do manual labor. They will be cheaper one day, although they probably will never be really cheap, given all the metal & servos & whatnot required to make one.

    They will, however, be able to work 24/7 and will not unionize, etc. etc.

    We have ever more people & ever less jobs. That’s not good, in the long run.

  6. 6.

    ruemara

    Back home after Vegas. I’ll miss a real bed, but I’m so glad to not be working, even though I better do some work to make up for missed work while I was away working.

    And $5for an apple or a cup of hot water has convinced me that conferences are Satan.

  7. 7.

    RareSanity

    @Punchy: The description says that it is “satire”, so I don’t think the robot is actually saying the stuff.

    Doesn’t stop the video from being funny, or Kevin from being a jerk.

    Typical Kevin…

  9. 9.

    WarMunchkin

    @Paul in KY: I think the whole thing about how technology creates new markets applies; it just won’t happen on a fast enough time scale to save people who get put out of work. The next market might be making cosmetic and creative features to decorate your robots and make them unique, or something. Swear mods or robots wearing tailored suits or whatnot. So creative work is still important.

    That said, I do think sometimes that if all meaningful labor and resource collection in your society is done by robots, the only people that get to live are the people who own the robots. So you either tax the shit out of them and use that money for UBI or you outright socialize robots. We’re not politically prepared for the robot revolution.

  11. 11.

    dr. bloor

    @Jager:

    I can’t wait for the “Retaliation Module” to be installed.

    Don’t hold your breath. The beta version they installed in the RubioBot was a miserable failure.

  13. 13.

    Paul in KY

    @WarMunchkin: Unless we become a Socialist utopia, you are not going to get a meaningful income unless you perform some meaningful work. In the olden days, this was taken care of by conscripting all the excess labor & going off & invading someone.

    When you have 9 able-bodied people fighting for 1 job, what happens to the other 8?

  16. 16.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Trymaine Lee is tweeting from a Trump rally in St Louis that’s already getting ugly, including a few videos. There’s something almost funny about the punk who’s itching for a fight before being pulled back by what looks like him mom and auntie, but he’s an angry little man who really wants to hurt somebody in the name of The Leader, and it’s scary to think what he might do when he’s only with his peers tonight, tomorrow, or next Thursday after getting drunk with his Trump’bros.

  17. 17.

    RareSanity

    @Paul in KY: My opinion is that while there will be a net loss of jobs, somebody still has to monitor, maintain, and program the robots…those are things they can’t do by themselves.

    I used to think that idea of “basic income” provided to all citizens was a pie in the sky, radically leftist notion. But more and more, I’m starting to think that may be the only way to stop all hell breaking loose in the U.S. during the coming decades.

  19. 19.

    gene108

    I took yesterday and am taking today off from work. It feels so damn good to not have to go the office!!!

  22. 22.

    O. Felix Culpa

    @gene108: Sigh. I’m now looking for an office to earn money in again, after a spate of unemployment to recover from the boss from hell. The leisure is nice; the money drain, not so much.

    Enjoy your time away!!!

  26. 26.

    Paul in KY

    @Raven: Man that was one pissed off Iowa coach. They have really underperformed, after they rose up in the polls.

    Good job!

  28. 28.

    Paul in KY

    @RareSanity: That’s a good point, but those people need to be smart & have passed some kind of training, etc. I have run into many people who really are not cut out for that kind of work & have never wanted that kind of work. It is obvious that a decent paying ‘factory’ job is gone like the dodo bird. Those people & their desires are not, however.

    I’m beginning to sound like that Kazinski nut, but I fear for some major troubles in about 30 years or so. There just seem to be so many fewer non-minimum wage jobs available & every year more people & more people…

  30. 30.

    RareSanity

    @Paul in KY:

    True, and the GOP is only hastening those problems by stoking the “it’s Those People’s fault” flames, trying to win elections instead of trying to address the real problems.

  33. 33.

    japa21

    @Paul in KY: Both Iowa and Wisconsin figured they needed more time to rest before the tournament starts next week.

    Meanwhile, my Spartans will continue rolling over everybody.

    ETA: And since I will be away for the weekend, in case they blow it nobody will remember by Monday to get on my case.

  37. 37.

    Mnemosyne

    I’ve been doing research for my historical novel and it turns out that French refugees fleeing the Terror who went to the US would almost certainly have ended up in Philadelphia. And you know who else was living in Philadelphia at the same time … ?

    …

    That’s right, Hitler. I was surprised, too, but you can’t argue with history.

  38. 38.

    Grumpy Code Monkey

    @Paul in KY:

    I’m thinking what we need are more small businesses doing specialized, small-scale manufacturing (where robots and automation are not cost-effective) tailored to local needs/tastes/etc. Keeps capital in the neighborhood, gets people working, all that good stuff.

    Also trying to puzzle out how to adjust self-employment taxes so that more people can go into business for themselves; either raise the income floor, or reduce the rates, or something.

    “Trickle-down” has focused wealth at the top; time for a “bubble-up” approach. Inject capital at the bottom of the economy (tax credits, subsidies, etc.), get people working and earning income such that they can actually buy things, get capital moving through all levels of the economy again.

  39. 39.

    The Golux

    @Raven:

    two stroke

    I had a couple of those two-stroke Saabs back in the 70s. They were dead simple mechanically and a blast to drive. If I could find one today I’d buy it, but the floorpans rusted so badly that there are almost none left.

  40. 40.

    Matt McIrvin

    We may actually not have ever more people. In some rich countries they’re facing the possibility of economic stagnation because the working-age population is declining (and the ratio of retirees to working-age people is ever-increasing). It’s worst in Japan, a country that’s resistant to bringing in a lot of immigrants.

    Birthrates are declining all over the world. For a while yet, it’s going to be possible to stem the tide of rich-world population decline by letting a lot of people immigrate: most of Africa is not so far along the transition, and their population will be growing rapidly for decades to come, so the flow to the rest of the world will probably have a lot more Africans in it. But at some point (admittedly, decades off) we’ll start to run out of immigrants and may actually start worrying about labor shortages.

    And it isn’t as if we can solve the problem by just demanding that people have more babies, since depending on an ever-increasing population is environmentally unsustainable even if it were socially possible.

  41. 41.

    gene108

    @Paul in KY:

    They have really underperformed, after they rose up in the polls.

    One of my cousin’s kids started doing his PhD in the USA this fall. College football season was starting and his school is in a major conference.

    I tried explaining to him how teams got ranked nationally, a the start of the year, but realized I was failing miserably because he was trying to it into other (more international) sports rankings, where rank is determined by actual results, and not the opinions of the media, before a single game is played.

  42. 42.

    weaselone

    @Paul in KY:

    If you have 9 able-bodied people per job, it’s not just the other 8 you have to worry about. The 9th person is probably just as screwed.

  43. 43.

    Brachiator

    @WarMunchkin:

    That said, I do think sometimes that if all meaningful labor and resource collection in your society is done by robots, the only people that get to live are the people who own the robots

    Until the robots own you.

  47. 47.

    gene108

    @RareSanity:

    The Reagan Revolution sparked much of the problem, in the 1980’s, by green lighting a bunch of M&A deals, to the surprise of Wall Street, that paved the way for hostile take overs, the rise of private equity firms, downsizing and the loss of manufacturing jobs, as assets were stripped to pay back the corporate raiders investors as quickly as possible and jobs eliminated, and benefits reduced, in order to maximize return to said investors.

    The M&A activity is one of the greatest upward wealth transfers, which rarely gets the coverage it deserves.

  48. 48.

    Technocrat

    @Baud:

    Yeah, I’m taking the exact date with a grain of salt, myself. But the economic and tech trends seem inevitable.

  49. 49.

    The Moar You Know

    Permanent lifelong unemployment is going to be a thing. Hopefully we’ll figure out some way to keep the food, energy and goodies flowing to everyone in a fairly just and equitable way. I’m not counting on it.

    As for “robot maintenance”, they’ll be doing that themselves, and far better than any human could.

  56. 56.

    Paul in KY

    @Grumpy Code Monkey: Excellent ideas. The people themselves do have to realize what is/has happened & adapt a bit. The people who made buggy whips had to make something else, etc.

  57. 57.

    Major Major Major Major

    @Brachiator: replace labor issues with knowledge and robots with literacy/books/printing press/telegraph/phone/radio/TV/Apple II/word processing/cell phones/modern computers/smartphones, and you have the complete history of IT concern trolling.

  58. 58.

    Mnemosyne

    @The Moar You Know:

    There’s another way to go, but people would freak out — reduce the workweek to 30 hours instead of 40 and hire more people. It’s insane to have a few people working 60 or 70 hour weeks while other people are unemployed. Hire 2 people to do that job for fewer hours.

    It would, of course, require paying salaries and hourly wages that would allow someone to support themselves with only 30 hours of work, which is what would probably cause the biggest part of the freak out.

  60. 60.

    Linnaeus

    @japa21:

    Spartans do look very good. Hard to see who will beat them.

    My Wolverines need to win today, methinks, if they’re going to have a chance for an NCAA bid.

  61. 61.

    Paul in KY

    @gene108: They (Iowa) did start out season with excellent record & got to #4 or 5, then just lost 7 out of next 10 games or something like that. I’m wondering if they got the big head, or injuries, or started pining for the tourney too soon…

  62. 62.

    NotMax

    @Iowa Old Lady

    Mom tells the story of how she sneaked out to take driving lessons on the sly because her then-husband didn’t approve of her learning to drive and refused teach her himself. This would have been circa 1950.

  64. 64.

    japa21

    @Paul in KY: Yep, but then Kentucky looked unbeatable last year. Then along came Wisconsin.

    When it is a one and done type of tournament, anything can happen.

  66. 66.

    Technocrat

    @Mnemosyne:

    We’d also need laws to insure that 30 doesn’t turn into “wink wink” 30, just like 40 became “wink wink” 40. Mandatory overtime would do it.

  72. 72.

    Linnaeus

    @Grumpy Code Monkey:

    “Trickle-down” has focused wealth at the top; time for a “bubble-up” approach. Inject capital at the bottom of the economy (tax credits, subsidies, etc.), get people working and earning income such that they can actually buy things, get capital moving through all levels of the economy again.

    Also known as “Keynesianism”.

  73. 73.

    Steve in the ATL

    @RareSanity:

    I used to think that idea of “basic income” provided to all citizens was a pie in the sky, radically leftist notion. But more and more, I’m starting to think that may be the only way to stop all hell breaking loose in the U.S. during the coming decades.

    Nixon (!) actually looked at it but decided it was not feasible politically.

  75. 75.

    Paul in KY

    @Linnaeus: There’s one of the modern problems. back in the previous-to-20th centuries, one of the rubs was that the mob would drag you out of your bed & hang you & burn down your mansion, after looting it. A merry time would be had by all.

    Now though, that just ain’t gonna ever happen, so the government would have to address it through strong regulations & enforcement, I guess.

  76. 76.

    NotMax

    @Technocrat

    I think they are eventually likely for long haul routes*, but that the number of vehicles and the timeline are wildly optimistic.

    *Also that drivers will be required in the cabs, for a goodly amount of time once the trucks exit the highways and navigate on secondary roads and around industrial areas’ loading docks.

    Can’t see delivery services such as UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc. completely doing without a human present in the vehicle for decades and decades more.

  77. 77.

    Mnemosyne

    @Linnaeus:

    Well, they didn’t have any incentive to do the 5-day workweek until the government stepped in and forced it on them. So that’s probably what would need to happen. And, as Technocrat said, you would have to have mandatory overtime laws to reduce the incentive for them to just keep people longer.

    And, of course, we have to continue to fix healthcare since a huge part of what prevents employers from hiring permanent people is not wanting to have to pay for their healthcare.

    In a rational world, it’s completely do-able, but we may not live in a rational world right now.

  78. 78.

    gex

    I watch something like this and it makes me just amazed at what nature can do. This is our state of the art bipedal robot and watching it walk, it’s amazing for a robot and really clumsy compared to what we are mimicking.

  79. 79.

    Mnemosyne

    @Steve in the ATL:

    One of the smartest things the WPA did was pay artists, playwrights, etc to do that work instead of taking up other jobs. It would be nice if there was a solid grant system for stuff like that. And better support for small businesses, also, too.

  80. 80.

    Technocrat

    @NotMax:

    Yeah, I agree that the predicted targets are mostly overexcited futurists.

    On the other hand, if I own a trucking empire, I’m doing my damnedest to think of how I can fire people using this technology. Eventually, they will figure out a way.

  81. 81.

    Linnaeus

    @Mnemosyne:

    Sure, and I agree generally with what you say here.

    I’m not as sanguine as I would like to be about the possibilities for such government action. As you say, we may not live in a rational world, and even in a rational world, there would be powerful disincentives to do it. It’s rational, in our economic system, to reduce your labor costs as much as possible.

  83. 83.

    ? Martin

    @Paul in KY:

    Amazing piece of technology (the robot, whether it actually swears or not). Just wonder about the future real world implications of having these things do manual labor. They will be cheaper one day, although they probably will never be really cheap, given all the metal & servos & whatnot required to make one.

    They will, however, be able to work 24/7 and will not unionize, etc. etc.

    We have ever more people & ever less jobs. That’s not good, in the long run.

    There are studies that show that automation has created more jobs than it has destroyed. The created jobs aren’t related to the ones lost, so they don’t help that particular displaced worker, but overall it results in a shift toward better and better paying jobs. Fewer coal miners, more hairdressers and yoga instructors.

    And they will become cheap. The servos and such are still expensive because we haven’t hit the modularity stage of robotics, but that should hit in the next few years. The reason it’ll happen is that replacing labor with robots shifts recurring costs to one-time capital costs, so any activity with a reasonable long time frame will come out ahead, even with fairly expensive robots. The reason we don’t currently have more automation is that robots still aren’t up to certain kinds of manufacturing tasks (small assembly, for example) and that programming the robots is non-trivial in many situations. Google is working on that problem by having the robots self-learn through rudimentary neural nets. It’s slow and for any destructive activity would be expensive given the huge amount of trial/error needed, but unlike people where the cost of knowledge transferral is expensive, for robots it’s trivial. Once you’ve taught a robot how to knit a sweater, teaching 10,000 robots to do it takes seconds. And better machine learning is coming that requires much less trial and error.

    The AlphaGo challenge (match 3 tonight) has resulted in a computer beating the worlds top Go player, something thought impossible a few months ago. It would appear that the computer mastered the game in a matter of months as compared to decades for a human. And Go is a non-trivial problem to solve.

    What people don’t grasp is the speed at which this is going to come. 2025 is going to look as different to us as 2015 would look to people in 1980. Once you teach a car to drive, teaching every car to drive becomes trivial – and cheap. And once that’s done, you can nearly stop investing in it and invest in another place – automating the guy who brings water to your office, the job of butchering food, and so on. People just don’t work on that scale, so societies costs to have a sufficient cohort of experienced drivers or butchers takes a constant effort as people retire, change jobs, etc. For automation, once it’s done, it’s pretty much done forever. It’s just a matter of copying the code to the new robot as you need more capacity. And if one breaks, replace it.

    People aren’t going to know what hit them. Entire industries will vanish nearly overnight. Now, that may not be so bad provided the benefits of that automation flow back to society at large. Right now, that’s not happening, but in the near future it will need to. It’ll need to look more like Star Trek than Kansas.

  84. 84.

    Technocrat

    Of course, some predictions just suck:

    Prediction 1929: Clothing Will Be Make From Asbestos

    link: http://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/g462/future-that-never-was-next-gen-tech-concepts/

    Dresses of asbestos that will be as lustrous as silk and will give long wear, with ease in cleaning, are predicted by an eastern scientist. Fabrics are already being made from trees and vegetables and the Romans made a sort of cloth from asbestos fibers centuries ago, so this prophecy is considered entirely reasonable by experts. The use of asbestos in the early Roman days was confined largely to the weaving of shrouds. According to tradition, Charlemagne had a tablecloth of asbestos which was cleaned by throwing it into the fire. In the seventeenth century, Chinese merchants displayed asbestos handkerchiefs and the Eskimos in Labrador have used lampwicks made of an asbestos fabric for many years

  85. 85.

    Goblue72

    @Paul in KY: Gernany has something on the order of two to three times as many manufacturing robots deployed per worker hour then we do yet manages to have twice as much of its workforce employed in manufacturing. They are also way more unionize than we are.

    Automation / robots doesn’t have to mean less blue collar work. We’ve eviscerated ourselves by handing the country over to the 1%.

  86. 86.

    Mnemosyne

    @Linnaeus:

    I think our current system has a very skewed idea of what the government’s role should be thanks to the influence of libertarians. Since we have a capitalist system where businesses have a rational interest in reducing labor costs, the countervailing pressure should come from the government to prevent that. Ideally, there would also be strong labor unions to prevent companies from gaming the system.

    The biggest problem with our system right now is that business has all of the power, and it’s seriously unbalanced things. When Adam Smith wrote about the wealth of nations, he was writing about labor, not business. We need to get the system back into balance so that business, labor, and the government can all balance each other and not let one branch run wild.

  89. 89.

    Goblue72

    @? Martin: Your MBA fantasy – and that’s all it is, a fantasy – is belied by stagnant wage growth, with ever and ever greater percentage of population seeing declining real wages, with almost the entirety of efficiency gains accrued to the most wealthy.

    http://www.epi.org/publication/stagnant-wages-in-2014/

    That is a 35 year trend line, and it’s reached even to the college educated so its not even about “Get MOAR SKILZ!”

  92. 92.

    ? Martin

    @Goblue72:

    Gernany has something on the order of two to three times as many manufacturing robots deployed per worker hour then we do yet manages to have twice as much of its workforce employed in manufacturing. They are also way more unionize than we are.

    Automation / robots doesn’t have to mean less blue collar work. We’ve eviscerated ourselves by handing the country over to the 1%.

    You mentioned this yesterday but didn’t address the fact that Germany had 40% of its workforce in manufacturing in 1970 and that’s down to 22%. That’s roughly the same decline in manufacturing jobs as the US over the same period. They’re doing nothing differently than the US in terms of preserving jobs. China is seeing declines, Taiwan, India, etc. Manufacturing as a percentage of global GDP has been cut nearly in half since 1970.

    Quite simply we spend less money on stuff than we used to. Period.

  93. 93.

    Goblue72

    @Mnemosyne: We don’t. He’s an MBA free trade fantasist who engages in a lot hand waving regarding the wage data not bearing out his fantasies of an awesome future if we just send our jobs to China.

  94. 94.

    NotMax

    @NotMax

    Combining several general topics on this thread, futurism and soccer.

    The Boccioni Dinamismo di un foot-baller is a favorite of mine at the Museum of Modern Art. Viewed from a reasonable distance it works best; close-ups really don’t do it justice. Used to be hung (maybe still is) in a location where one couldn’t get very close to it.

  95. 95.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    sounds like Rubio is looking for his coat, trying to decide if he has to say goodbye to the hosts or if he can just slip out waving
    BREAKING: @ marcorubio communications director @ AlexConant tells us Rubio supporters in Ohio should vote for @ JohnKasich.

  97. 97.

    Mnemosyne

    @Goblue72:

    You guys both agree that robots do not inevitably mean that workers will become completely obsolete. Or are you going to change your statement now that I’ve pointed that out?

  98. 98.

    Cacti

    @? Martin:

    You mentioned this yesterday but didn’t address the fact that Germany had 40% of its workforce in manufacturing in 1970 and that’s down to 22%. That’s roughly the same decline in manufacturing jobs as the US over the same period. They’re doing nothing differently than the US in terms of preserving jobs. China is seeing declines, Taiwan, India, etc. Manufacturing as a percentage of global GDP has been cut nearly in half since 1970.

    Quite simply we spend less money on stuff than we used to. Period.

    The 43 year old spokesman for the millennial generation is impervious to facts, data, or the need for intellectual coherence.

    And Boomers aren’t the boss of him! Don’t you forget it (whether you’re actually a Boomer or not).

  101. 101.

    Paul in KY

    @? Martin: Coal miners made more money than hairdressers & yoga instructors. Talking just about the employees. The owners of the salons/boutiques probably make more money.

  103. 103.

    The Other Chuck

    @Technocrat:

    Mandatory overtime would do it.

    Not really. The main problem is places like Walmart scheduling virtually all their associates for 39 hours a week so as not to have to pay benefits. Say hi to the 29 hour workweek.

  104. 104.

    Brachiator

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    BREAKING: @ marcorubio communications director @ AlexConant tells us Rubio supporters in Ohio should vote for @ JohnKasich.

    From a Politico story

    Alex Conant, Rubio’s communications director, acknowledged that Kasich is the only candidate who can defeat Trump in Ohio, which awards all of its 66 delegates to the winner. “If you are a Republican primary voter in Ohio and you want to defeat Donald Trump, your best chance in Ohio is John Kasich,” Conant told CNN on Friday.

    Talk about grasping at straws.

    The Rubio people are also still throwing shade at Cruz. Oh, well.

  105. 105.

    RareSanity

    @Cacti:

    The 43 year old spokesman for the millennial generation is impervious to facts, data, or the need for intellectual coherence.

    That would be “Generation X”, of which I’m also a part of.

    We are the middle child of U.S. generations, all anyone ever talks about is Boomers and Millennials.

  106. 106.

    Technocrat

    @The Other Chuck:

    I think both problems are bad. Scheduling them for 30 hours and making them work 50 is as bad or worse than scheduling them for 29 and withholding benefits.

    Let’s say benefits add up to 30% of your compensation. If employers require the 30 hour employee to stay for 39 hours, they’ve more than made up the difference.

    @RareSanity:

    You also gave us Grunge. I, for one, will be eternally grateful.

  107. 107.

    Kay

    Boston public high schoolers won their fight:

    Days after thousands of students walked out to protest budget cuts, Mayor Martin J. Walsh said Thursday that he plans to announce that Boston high schools will be spared the controversial reductions that endangered popular programs and teacher jobs.

    Pretty impressive results for such a raggedy bunch! :)

  108. 108.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Paul in KY: I suspect health care and particularly nursing is set to explode. In Japan they keep trying to build robot nurses and companions for old people, even though this is probably the thing robots are worst at in the whole world.

    A lot of the jobs that seem like they might have more stable or even increasing demand are in human-to-human service or caring professions that used to be classified as women’s work: nursing, child care, primary and secondary education (admittedly dropping birth rates could lessen demand for anything to do with kids). Also other lower-status medical jobs like EMTs. We think of a lot of these as low-pay, low-status jobs, but maybe they shouldn’t be and won’t be in a more automated world. They’re things that are very hard to automate, not least because people actually want to interact with other human beings.

  111. 111.

    Cacti

    @RareSanity:

    That would be “Generation X”, of which I’m also a part of.

    We are the middle child of U.S. generations, all anyone ever talks about is Boomers and Millennials.

    I know. I belong to it myself.

    I’m poking fun at his tendency to play voice of a younger generation in the comments.

  112. 112.

    Peale

    @RareSanity: Shush. He’s obviously going through a mid-life crisis, so being a spokesperson who is still hip to the emerging youth of today helps keep the focus off that receding hairline. I like to think that I’m a Screenager for the same reason.

  114. 114.

    Paul in KY

    @Matt McIrvin: Hope they have unions! My mother recently had to stay in a rehab center for 3 or 4 weeks after she cracked a pelvis bone. The staff were hardworking (doing jobs that would turn me into an outlaw), but were understaffed & underpaid. I don’t see how they would go in there day after day (for what they were making against what they had to do/deal with).

  115. 115.

    catclub

    @Matt McIrvin: Yoga teachers and personal trainers.

    personal services … hmmm.

    The guy who wrote the Black Swan defined it as jobs that do versus jobs that do not scale.
    You only need one really good programmer for the whole world – also one really good pop singer.
    Hair cutters and dog walkers do not scale.

  116. 116.

    Cacti

    @Peale:

    Shush. He’s obviously going through a mid-life crisis, so being a spokesperson who is still hip to the emerging youth of today helps keep the focus off that receding hairline

    Winner of the internets.

  117. 117.

    Mnemosyne

    @Kay:

    I think the kids are alright. ;-) I actually like the Millennials, because they realize they got a raw deal and want to do something about it.

  118. 118.

    Paul in KY

    @Goblue72: Have a brie story for you. Got one of the ones where it is setup to bake. Followed the directions, which said to bake at 415, for 30 mins. About 20 mins in, my smoke detector went off & when I opened the oven door, found out the thing had ruptured & put smoking brie all over the oven floor. Think (in hindsight) that the directions were wrong on temp, etc.

    So it can be dangerous!

  119. 119.

    gene108

    @Goblue72:

    He’s an MBA free trade fantasist who engages in a lot hand waving regarding the wage data not bearing out his fantasies of an awesome future if we just send our jobs to China.

    The reason China gets manufacturing jobs is because they work hard, in cooperation with their government, to undercut everyone else on the planet.

    Posted this a few threads ago, but China is undercutting India on the manufacturing of traditional Indian saris.

    India is poorer than China.

    The problem with the U.S.A. is a lack of balance between the interests of labor versus capital.

    There’s no reason manufacturing has to be synonymous with “good paying” jobs. One hundred years ago 8 year old kids ran around textile mills for pennies a day, because the family – who also worked in the same factory – needed the extra income to survive.

    A decades long labor movement turned manufacturing into “good paying jobs”.

    We just assumed the other service sector jobs, like flipping burgers or working a cash register, would be temporary or not the main source of income for any family.

    When that started to change, we did not change labor policies, such raising the minimum wage along with inflation, to help those people at the bottom.

    We also lack a coherent effort, unlike the Chinese, to promote our export business. The Export-Import Bank was nearly gutted for shits and giggles, by Republicans, because reasons.

  121. 121.

    catclub

    @Brachiator: If Trump comes into the convention with 45% of the delegates
    and three others come in with 20%, 20%, and 15%, then Trump still gets the nom – or goes third party if he is dumped by the party.

    Only if Trump and somebody else (only Cruz) both have 45% of the delegates does Trump not get the nom.

    Tough luck, GOP

  122. 122.

    Technocrat

    @catclub:

    I really like that definition, although I might change it to “jobs that do not scale easily“. I wouldn’t have thought teaching would scale until people started putting videos on YouTube.

    Yes. I am pre-Youtube. =(

  123. 123.

    Mnemosyne

    @Matt McIrvin:

    It’s probably not a coincidence that the least outsourceable jobs are also the lowest-paid and the ones most likely to have employers trying to pay people under the table or hire illegal workers for less than minimum wage.

    I think that’s why Fight for 15 has been so important — they’re pointing out that fast food and retail jobs ARE the new factory jobs, and they should be compensated accordingly.

  124. 124.

    Cacti

    @Baud:

    All age groups are cherished in Generation Baud!

    I know American Samoa was a big let down for you.

    Are you hoping to change your fortunes in the Northern Marianas caucus tomorrow?

  125. 125.

    ? Martin

    @Paul in KY:

    Coal miners made more money than hairdressers & yoga instructors.

    Before automation, fuck no they didn’t. In 1923 we had 825,000 coal miners in this country – about 2% of the workforce. They made shit wages – a lot of them were kids.

    Now they earn okay, but it’s because we only have 100,000 workers yet we extract 3x as much. And the coal mining jobs are being replaced by jobs putting up wind turbines and building solar. Those jobs pay better than coal does – and they are safer jobs.

  126. 126.

    Goblue72

    @? Martin:

    Germany’s % in employed in manufacturing was roughly 40%. It is roughly 22% today. 45% decline.

    U.S. in 1970 – 25%. Today – 9%. 64% decline.

    Japan 1970 – 28%. Today – 18% (eyeballing a graph on this one). 36% decline.

    German manufacturing wage & benefits also 66% higher than the U.S.

    But keep waving those MBA hands.

  128. 128.

    gene108

    @gene108:

    Just wanted to add, wages were rising in the late 1990’s for the first and only time, since the 1970’s.

    If we spent the budget surplus on infrastructure, instead of tax cuts (remember the $300 surplus check we all got in the summer of 2001?), we probably could have helped buoy the gains in wage growth.

    The damage Bush & Co did is greatly under estimated.

  129. 129.

    Peale

    Worth spreading this one around. You have to hand it to the Koch’s though. They wouldn’t really stand to gain much in their businesses from the privatization of the VA. Its just a matter of principal that government healthcare shouldn’t exist and therefore steps need to be taken to make sure it doesn’t.

  131. 131.

    Mnemosyne

    @Goblue72:

    I’m afraid of any cheese that you can roll into a small ball and use to play soccer on your school desk during a boring part of French class. Not that I ever did that, of course.

  132. 132.

    ? Martin

    @Matt McIrvin:

    They’re things that are very hard to automate, not least because people actually want to interact with other human beings.

    Exactly. Service jobs are an increasing portion of the US economy. Yoga and hairdressing are jobs people want to not be automated and are willing to pay to not be automated. Sometimes they are high wage, and sometimes they are not. And you’re correct that health services is a rapidly growing area and one that I think everyone would agree benefits from increasing human interaction.

    Can a coal miner perform a service job with minimal training? I don’t see why not.

  133. 133.

    Paul in KY

    @? Martin: I’m talking in ‘modern’ post-UMW times. Didn’t know you were talking about the entire lifespan of coal mining.

  134. 134.

    singfoom

    I wish for a post-scarcity world, like Star Trek or the other sci-fi worlds out there. But I think we’re more likely to end up in a world like Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, where even if you have nothing you’ve got a basic replicator…

    And people with giant wealth still exist. It’ll still be better in our current situation. Eventually the US/the world will need a basic income. Are there ANY countries out there doing anything like that yet?

  136. 136.

    Brachiator

    @catclub:

    If Trump comes into the convention with 45% of the delegates and three others come in with 20%, 20%, and 15%, then Trump still gets the nom – or goes third party if he is dumped by the party.

    Three others? Rubio is done, especially so if he loses Florida. Kasich would have to win Ohio and do strongly elsewhere to justify staying in the race.

    Otherwise, it’s really down to Trump and Cruz. Rubio would have been smarter to beg his supporters to vote for Cruz, who at least has made a credible run at delegates.

    Trump going third party is risky business. He would be much weaker as a candidate here, and would have to build some kind of organization from scratch. And what if he still won? The GOP would mess their pants.

    Only if Trump and somebody else (only Cruz) both have 45% of the delegates does Trump not get the nom.

    Yep.

  137. 137.

    Mnemosyne

    @gene108:

    To tag onto this, one of the reasons we don’t have good blue-collar jobs for men right now is that we’re not maintaining and improving our infrastructure. If we were actually repairing the shit that needs repairs and/or building new and improved shit, there would be plenty of work to go around.

  138. 138.

    singfoom

    We’re going to end up in a Diamond Age Or a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer kind of world more than a Trek or other kind of world.

    Is any country out there doing any kind of universal income like program?

  139. 139.

    Mnemosyne

    @Technocrat:

    Don’t tell Goblue, because he’ll have a heart attack, but brie reminds me of string cheese. I think it’s the old Irish and Italian strain in me that makes me prefer hard cheeses like a nice sharp cheddar or Parmesan.

  140. 140.

    ? Martin

    @Goblue72: You know what manufacturing industry Germany and Japan lead the world? Automated industrial equipment.

    They’ll be the last to lose those jobs. Failure of US leadership to not have that industry? Sure. But Germany and Japan have been losing manufacturing jobs as you now agree, and they will continue to lose manufacturing jobs.

    Your veiled suggestion that Germany was able to add jobs by pointing to their higher manufacturing mix simply isn’t true. They’re still losing these jobs, just a little bit slower.

  141. 141.

    Brachiator

    @? Martin:

    Yoga and hairdressing are jobs people want to not be automated and are willing to pay to not be automated.

    A robot that could do hair dressing would be tough. Not impossible, but tough.

    But when someone invents a flexible robot that can teach yoga, it’s game over, man. Game over!

  142. 142.

    Technocrat

    @Mnemosyne:

    Brie is cheese for people who aren’t actually hungry. I spend a large part of my childhood in France, and Babybel was the preferred snack for my friends and I. It’s not hard hard, but it’s satisfying to bite.

    Once you unwrap it, you can mold/throw the wax, so there’s that.

  144. 144.

    Paul in KY

    @singfoom: Think the closest historical parallel would be Soviet Communism. Generally a guaranteed job doing something & thus some form of ‘pay’.

    Of course, Communism in Russia was almost immediately subverted by Lenin & his henchmen to be a dictatorship, etc.

  145. 145.

    Paul in KY

    @Brachiator: I’m thinking more of some kind of Jetsons thing where a device would go over your head & seconds later: primo styling. Don’t know if that would suffice as a robot, though.

  146. 146.

    ? Martin

    @Paul in KY:

    I’m talking in ‘modern’ post-UMW times. Didn’t know you were talking about the entire lifespan of coal mining.

    But there’s an important dynamic in this. Automation is what allowed the jobs that remain to be high wage jobs. Longshoremen have a median salary of $100K. So you get a choice from automation:

    1) Earn more if you remain in the job
    2) Earn more if you can make the transition to that other industry
    3) Earn nothing if you can’t remain in the job or make the transition.

    I don’t see that 1, 2 are problems in need of solving. 3 needs to be solved, and there’s a lot of ways to solve it (guaranteed minimum wage – I’m on board), but blaming trade deals isn’t it, and denying the realities of automation aren’t it.

    And just to be clear, I’m probably farther left than most of the anti-trade folks in terms of how to solve 3. I simply don’t believe in expending energy trying to stop something that inevitable and overall beneficial to society at large. Standing athwart history yelling stop is what conservatives do. Denial of facts is not a liberal thing, regardless of how many ad-hominems people want to throw.

    And no, I don’t have an MBA.

  147. 147.

    Technocrat

    @singfoom:

    I guess unemployment benefits could be considered a form of Basic Income.

    In fact, extending and enhancing those benefits could be a non-bloody way to get to UBI.

  148. 148.

    Ruckus

    @Paul in KY:
    Some one makes the robot. Someone makes the tooling that is used for lots of parts of the robot. Maybe some day all of this will be automated. Who designs the robots? Who makes the decisions about what it does? We are quite a long way away from automating the process today. Will that day get here? Most likely at some point.

    As others have or will also point out, humanity will have to decide what and how we automate and what happens to the billions of people out of work and with nothing to lose if we don’t provide for them. We see the tip of this now with the discussion of self driving cars. They provide transport with no interaction of humans, other than making the things, keeping the infrastructure working. I have a friend who repairs traffic signals. We’ve been using these for decades, they are pretty reliable, but they do break, they get knocked down, water gets in and shorts things out……What happens if everything working 100% is required? What happens is when part of that fails it’s a 100% failure rate and the best case is nothing else happens until it gets fixed. Worst case? Disaster. There is no perfection, not humans, not machines, not electronics, not robots, nothing. It’s a pipe dream.

  151. 151.

    singfoom

    @Paul in KY: Yeah, I wouldn’t count that. I was more asking about currnet societies. I know there aren’t any other places doing full UBI, but I was wondering if there are UBI like policies anywhere.

  153. 153.

    PaulWartenberg2016

    Regarding Republicans: while the candidates themselves are scary, and self-serving, and idiotic, they are all sharing essentially the same platform of war, deregulation, and economic disaster that wrecked our nation between 2001 to 2009. In some respects, they are going to push an agenda far more destructive than what Dubya gave us.

    And Dear God help us, they hope to WIN on that platform because they’re doing their damnedest to make us think things are worse under Obama than they were under Bush the Lesser. And nobody in the beltway media is calling them on their BS. And they’re likely to convince enough voters regardless of the candidate to believe those lies.

  156. 156.

    Matt McIrvin

    @? Martin:

    Can a coal miner perform a service job with minimal training? I don’t see why not.

    Depends on the job. Some of these are actually highly skilled professions.

  157. 157.

    Paul in KY

    @Ruckus: I think right now, it is automate to the max, baby!!! The people pushing that prefer to buy machines, rather than employ messy people (IMO).

  159. 159.

    Paul in KY

    @singfoom: Maybe in the Gulf States, where if you are one of the citizens, you get some change from the oil profits, also subsidized everything.

  161. 161.

    Brachiator

    Doc and Grumpy, together again.

    Or is that Sleepy and Dopey?

    Ben Carson threw his support behind Donald Trump Friday morning, saying the two men had “buried the hatchet” and praising the Republican Party’s front-runner as a “the voice of the people to be heard.”

  162. 162.

    ? Martin

    @Brachiator:

    A robot that could do hair dressing would be tough. Not impossible, but tough.

    But when someone invents a flexible robot that can teach yoga, it’s game over, man. Game over!

    There’s an approach to looking at how people use products and services called ‘job to be done theory’. Yes, you could probably build a robot to cut hair, but that’s not the job people hire a hairdresser to do a lot of the time. A lot of people go to feel better about themselves, or to find out what’s happening in the community. Robots can probably replace some of that (I don’t go for those reason) and in the cases where it does, that social job will shift to somewhere else.

    That’s really how you need to look at these occupations. Nobody is hiring the coal miner to do anything other than get a rock out of the ground, and if anything the less they know about that activity the better. A robot can do that job better than a person with no social or other value lost. Could you replace a teacher with a robot? Sure, but we wouldn’t – at least not as a baseline. We might change the job of the teacher to be less teaching or less assessment and offload some of those jobs to computers or robots, but we’d fill that in with other jobs – wellness coach, etc.

    And that’s why I go on about how non-value-add jobs are all inevitably going to be replaced. A perfect example of a non-value-add job is the FedEx delivery person. That persons job is to take a box from one place to another without changing the box in any conceivable way. You do not have a relationship with that person. Ideally, they come and go silently and leave no trace. That’s a job that will be automated – and there are about a million such workers. And eliminating that job will make products cheaper or more widely available, and we’ll use those savings to hire people to do jobs that add value – work on our house, teach our kids, take care of us.

    The only real impediment to this is the wealth gap. All of that capital tied up in billionaires is being wasted. Its doing no work. It’s employing nobody. But US consumers don’t take their savings from efficiency and save it, they spend it. They buy bigger houses and hire gardeners and send their kids to camp. The money shifts from one form of labor to another, but it shifts to a form of labor that generally both parties find to be more valuable, more rewarding, and which consumers are more inclined to pay more for – because it’s not a necessity and it’s not commoditized. Few parents think of their kids teacher as a commodity, or of their hairdresser as a commodity. That’s a form of worker protection because these workers have a set of individuals that value them personally and will act in their best interest. It’s not always as effective as it needs, but it’s at least a positive cycle, where non-value add jobs are negative cycles. Consumers are always looking to lower that cost because there’s no benefit gained there.

  163. 163.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Paul in KY: Generally a guaranteed job doing something & thus some form of ‘pay’.

    Which led to the common old saying: “they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.”

  165. 165.

    ? Martin

    @Matt McIrvin: I’m not suggesting *any* service job. You can’t expect them all to become neurosurgeons, but in aggregate they can do most of these jobs.

  166. 166.

    Matt McIrvin

    …and in general, any job you can actually transition into with minimal training in a world anything like ours is probably going to be a crappy, low-paying job, unless you’re very lucky and manage to get in on the ground floor of something new and big.

    I don’t think there’s any easy way around the misery when whole industries get eliminated, though a UBI can help. Even that is a tough sell, because people just do not want other people taking their tax moneys without their being able to lord it over the recipients. Someone on my FB feed just reposted a meme supporting food-stamp programs and someone quickly commented about how they need to be “reengineered” to stop people from using their food stamps to buy candy.

  171. 171.

    Mnemosyne

    @Matt McIrvin:

    Right, but what people are saying is that there’s no reason for fast food or retail jobs that require the same amount of training that a 1950s low-level factory job did to be so low-paid, other than for the convenience of business owners. There’s no logical reason for it at all.

  172. 172.

    goblue72

    @gene108: Would mostly agree. As I noted above – and have repeatedly elsewhere on the topic of free trade agreements and wage stagnation generally – its not an inevitability (wage stagnation). And its not something curable with MOAR TRAINING or by exporting manufacturing jobs and having everyone flip burgers and install solar panels. Germany doesn’t have manufacturing jobs with wage & benefits 66% higher than the U.S. or a middle class stronger than us through magic.

    Its through the power of labor. Through unionization. Through workers have power at the negotiating table to force ownership & management to split the gains from the business enterprises more equitably between ownership and labor. And that only comes through power and leverage. The ownership class doesn’t share unless its forced to.

    We don’t need more free trade agreements. We need more pro-labor laws. And that is something BOTH parties have walked away from. Even Obama. He completely walked away from card-check legislation without a fight, for example.

  173. 173.

    Paul in KY

    @goblue72: Man, that looked yummy! See they baked it in the box, so as to stop problem I had. Think mine would have been OK, if less temp & minutes.

  175. 175.

    goblue72

    @? Martin: Longshore don’t have $100k jobs “because automation.” Longshoreman have better paying jobs because the ILWU is one of the most aggressive, radical labor unions in the country who aren’t afraid to fight pack, aren’t afraid to strike, and still control a significant portion of the labor force in the ports. They have power, which is why they are paid well. Not “because automation”.

  176. 176.

    Brachiator

    @Paul in KY:

    I’m thinking more of some kind of Jetsons thing where a device would go over your head & seconds later: primo styling. Don’t know if that would suffice as a robot, though.

    This works, too. But it requires maybe some dexterity and fine controls to style and comb hair, to cut hair without hurting the customer, etc. This doesn’t have to be a robot, just some kind of gizmo that fits over the customer’s head.

    But would some people also want a device that could brush their hair for them? And do touch up styling?

  177. 177.

    Ruckus

    @Paul in KY:
    There is and always will be a segment of the owner class that wants the most profits at the least effort. Groups of people are messy, they always will be. Just look at the group we have here. Groups of machines are messy also. Ultraviolet Thunder’s job is repairing very expensive machines, my friend repairs very solid technology of traffic signals. In my job we have 2 suppliers who repair the machines we use to mfg mostly tooling that others use to make things. We repair and rebuild that tooling. It takes people to do all of these jobs, machines are way far off that are that sophisticated, if they ever exist. That said, I’ve been working in the machining field for over 50 yrs as both a worker and an owner and it has changed dramatically. But people are still the key. They do different processes, some at a much more precise level but they are still required. Automation has it’s place but mostly that is when every product/process is exactly the same. Add in variety of much complexity or lower production quantities and people still win. Will it always be so? My prediction is yes, simply because of perfection, a totally impossible goal.

  178. 178.

    Baud

    @Paul in KY:

    You are entirely correct that the Rentiers will never give up anything, unless forced in some way.

    Why is this even debatable? This is universally true of all but the most altruistic groups.

  179. 179.

    Robert Sneddon

    @raven: RD, stood for “ring-ding” which was the noise the engine made just before the piston crown melted through. There was a solid trade in stolen RDs here in the UK for the racing business which burned (literally) through a lot of engines. Air-cooling didn’t always live up to its name, not when running them at 9000 rpm continuously for half an hour at a time.

    It helped that the frame, suspension and tyres weren’t up to much so there was a ready supply of bent bikes with usable engines after the owners had stuffed them under an Armco barrier on a tight corner.

  180. 180.

    ? Martin

    @goblue72: Jesus, you are obstinate.

    Great union that lost 95% of their jobs to containerization. That shift to automation increased the skill level of the jobs that remained and allowed wages to shift. There are more people employed as dog walkers in the US as longshoremen.

  181. 181.

    geg6

    @Mnemosyne:

    Seriously. All you have to do is go to Mexico to see that those people work their asses off all day. I was in Cozumel once, about 6 or 7 months or so after a major hurricane hit the island and Cancun. There was lot of building going on, repairs and complete rebuilds of various hotels and resorts after the storm. I was with the ex on a dive trip, so we were up very early every morning to catch the dive boat and the crew working on the resort next door to the one we were staying in were already at work. Same guys were there when we got back midday and when we returned from whatever sightseeing or shopping we did in the afternoon. They didn’t pack up and go home until at least 6 or 7 pm. And the staff at our resort worked crazy hours, too. Hardest working people I ever saw.

  182. 182.

    trollhattan

    @Technocrat:
    Driver-assistance features (lane-changing, self-parking, etc.) yes, self-driving, no. Autonomous cars requiring no driver input are a long way off and the slow rate of turnover of the existing rolling stock ensures that even when they’re a reality, meaningful market penetration will take a good long while.

  183. 183.

    Paul in KY

    @Ruckus: I just said that’s what they want, not that they would necessarily get their desires. Those maintenance jobs are fine, but they require skilled training, etc.

    My original comments were about those dudes/dudettes who don’t want to & probably couldn’t cut the training needed (which would not be free, I guess). Those people (and there’s a lot of them) used to have a ‘path’ to a decent career somewhere. Those careers are dead or dying. Those people, with those attitudes, are very much alive (for the present time). If you think they are going to just genteelly starve, you don’t know/understand them.

  185. 185.

    trollhattan

    @raven:
    I tested an RD400 before getting my CB400f and remember is as being wicked quick with a powerful but very abrupt and narrow power band. Light and agile to be sure. Friend had a Kawasaki 500 triple two-stroke, maybe the original donorcycle. Holy crap, scary fast and a frame fashioned of noodles.He survived it and it cured his motorcycle habit.

  186. 186.

    Paul in KY

    @Baud: Too many people (here and not here) seem to have this idea of the businessman/owner as basically a good hearted individual just trying to play the hand they were dealt.

    I try to disabuse them of that delusion.

    You can continue running for Pres to fix all this.

  187. 187.

    raven

    @geg6: You don’t have to go to Mexico. Our roofing and painting crews were Mexican and Central American and thev busted their asses.

  191. 191.

    ? Martin

    @goblue72:

    Its through the power of labor. Through unionization. Through workers have power at the negotiating table to force ownership & management to split the gains from the business enterprises more equitably between ownership and labor. And that only comes through power and leverage. The ownership class doesn’t share unless its forced to.

    We don’t need more free trade agreements. We need more pro-labor laws. And that is something BOTH parties have walked away from. Even Obama. He completely walked away from card-check legislation without a fight, for example.

    You are contradicting yourself here. I agree that we need better labor protection and higher wages – no argument, and I’ve never argued that. But Germany has an even more open trade situation than the US so obviously trade is not the source of the problem. Germany is competing with much lower wage labor even within the EU, and they do that by having a much more advanced manufacturing industry which requires higher skills and which is harder to automate. 60% of young people in Germany participate in apprenticeship programs. Apprenticeships *are* higher education, just delivered in a different form. And I’ve made no argument anywhere that we shouldn’t adopt something similar, nor have I made an argument that these programs shouldn’t be made available to displaced workers.

    But Germany benefits from that trade situation (notice they are the strongest advocate for the EU and for open borders) because they believe they can win through exporting. You don’t believe the US can do that. You don’t think we can do a better job than China or Mexico, that we must hide from them, and I find that offensive.

    You’ve made no coherent argument how trade has led to the job result. Claiming that China is taking jobs is refuted by the fact that manufacturing jobs in China are also on the decline. I don’t deny that a lot of other things are coincident with the trade expansion that has led to a loss of jobs and of wages, but that has much more to do with Reagan’s anti-labor/anti-tax views and to inevitable forces of industrialization, not to trade.

  194. 194.

    Mnemosyne

    @Baud:

    Because libertarians are stupidly convinced that capitalism can run itself without anyone supervising it because it is inherently good and moral. Alan Greenspan was genuinely baffled that the banks were willing to tank the worldwide housing market just to make a couple of extra bucks for themselves in the short term.

  195. 195.

    Brachiator

    @? Martin:

    There’s an approach to looking at how people use products and services called ‘job to be done theory’.

    You’re overthinking it. And you are pointlessly trying to predict the future.

    We are all just having fun here speculating. But even the fantasy of Downton Abbey is instructive here. A certain class of people used to employ servants for all sorts of jobs, some we can no longer even imagine.

    It wasn’t just automation that replaced these jobs, it was a change in the idea of what types of service jobs were appropriate.

    People used to things that sales clerks in stores were essential. Now, there are people who detest the idea of going to the store and wasting time on petty human interactions and order all their stuff through Amazon.

    Few parents think of their kids teacher as a commodity, or of their hairdresser as a commodity. That’s a form of worker protection because these workers have a set of individuals that value them personally and will act in their best interest.

    You are all wrong here. The Downton Abbey and department store examples are easy counters.

    In Southern California, hair styling for women is still a fairly good business. Barbershops for men seem to be in steep decline. Nail places are popular here and there, but were practically non-existent 30 years ago. Taste is capricious, not rigidly subject to the theory that you are proposing.

    A perfect example of a non-value-add job is the FedEx delivery person. That persons job is to take a box from one place to another without changing the box in any conceivable way. You do not have a relationship with that person.I

    I have a friend who had quite a relationship with the UPS guy who used to deliver packages to her office. But that’s a story for another day.

  196. 196.

    gene108

    @goblue72:

    Its through the power of labor. Through unionization. Through workers have power at the negotiating table to force ownership & management to split the gains from the business enterprises more equitably between ownership and labor. And that only comes through power and leverage. The ownership class doesn’t share unless its forced to.

    Ownership in Germany is much more pro-labor than in the U.S. and it trickles through into government. I believe German companies expect a factory to be unionized, with management having to deal with union leadership.

    I believe VW was a bit taken aback, when the state government in Tennessee pushed hard to make sure their factory there did not agree to unionize, because their whole business plan, with regards to labor and management relations is built around factory workers belonging to a union.

    In short, German workers are not fighting against union busting management / ownership and their paid for cronies in government.

    Therefore comparing the strenght of German unions to U.S. unions is not an “apples to apples” comparison.

  197. 197.

    Felonius Monk

    Apropos of the topic of robots, automation, and unemployment, I strongly recommend Kurt Vonnegut’s early novel titled Player Piano. You can read about it here.

    It is a thinly disguised satire about the GE plant in Schenectady, NY. where Vonnegut worked at the time he wrote this. It pissed off a lot of people at GE at the time (early 1950s).

    It’s been a number of years since I last read it, but it might be worth a reread now.

  198. 198.

    ? Martin

    @trollhattan:

    Autonomous cars requiring no driver input are a long way off and the slow rate of turnover of the existing rolling stock ensures that even when they’re a reality, meaningful market penetration will take a good long while.

    The slow turnover is certainly correct, at least for passenger vehicles, but the no driver input will be here by 2020. The economic incentives are monumental, and the technology needed exists – it just hasn’t been assembled in the proper form.

    But turnover of commercial vehicles will happen pretty quickly. Capital costs for most delivery vehicles is less than the annual cost for the driver, so you break even within months. For long-haul it’s just as fast because though the cost of the equipment is higher than the labor costs, you have a vehicle that can drive nearly 24/7.

    The limiting factor will be infrastructure – how do you service a fleet of self-driving semis? That doesn’t exist now, and it’ll need to be built and there’s a bit of a mismatch between who controls that infrastructure now and who benefits from the switch.

  199. 199.

    geg6

    @raven:

    We still do not have a significant Hispanic population around here. I’m not sure why that is when Philly and Erie both have significant numbers. Not so much here in the Pittsburgh area. The vast majority of the small Hispanic student population on my campus are out-of-state students. Mainly from Chicago, Texas, California and Florida.

  200. 200.

    Peale

    @trollhattan: I used to think decades, but then decades seemed to have passed rather quickly. Within the next 15 years, 1/2 the long haul trucking jobs will be gone.

  202. 202.

    geg6

    @raven:

    People are much more used to Asian/South Asian minorities here. It’s a demographic that has slowly but surely increased here over the past couple of decades. Probably due to the growth in tech, medical and higher ed sectors here.

  204. 204.

    gene108

    @geg6:

    I’m not sure why that is when Philly

    Relative to its population size, Philly really does not have much of a Hispanic population.

    I’ve seen the Raleigh, N.C. area transform, over the last 20 years, with the influx of Hispanics.

    Housing construction, gardening, etc. jobs in Raleigh are all done by Hispanics.

    In the Philly area you still have those jobs done by non-Hispanics.

    Only place I’ve really seen Hispanics expand in, in the Philly area, is back-of-restaurant services, such as cooks, dishwashers, etc.

  205. 205.

    Brachiator

    @geg6:

    Seriously. All you have to do is go to Mexico to see that those people work their asses off all day.

    I just go up the street here is Southern California.

    There are some racist fools who think that Latinos are poor and stupid. Many of these morons are also English only nutjobs, who barely speak and write ‘Murican with any skill. There was a local story here about a Hilton hotel in the San Gabriel Valley which catered to Chinese travelers. Many of the staff were Latino. They not only worked hard, but many of them spoke English, Mandarin and Cantonese.

  207. 207.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Brachiator: I have a friend who had quite a relationship with the UPS guy who used to deliver packages to her office.

    I think I saw a movie about that once…

  208. 208.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Felonius Monk: I always thought that one was interesting for a couple of reasons. My dad worked for GE in the Seventies and some of the culture he was making fun of was still around by then. Also, it’s an unusual book in that Vonnegut hadn’t quite yet developed the pseudo-naive, absurdist Vonnegut voice that I associated with all of his writing (which emerged full-blown in “The Sirens of Titan” several years later), so it reads kind of like an alternate-universe Vonnegut.

  209. 209.

    NotMax

    @raven

    Love it that in the “ethnic” aisle at the supermarket where Mom lives on Long Island, one side is now all kosher foods and the other side is all halal items.

    Mexican/Latin American population on Maui was negligible to non-existent when first moved here over 30 years ago. Today it is probably around 10%.

  210. 210.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Brachiator:

    There are some racist fools who think that Latinos are poor and stupid.

    “lazy welfare moochers who are stealing our jobs because they’ll work for a dollar a day”… (Terry Pratchett had some fun with this kind of self-annihilating complaint in one of his books.)

  211. 211.

    gene108

    @raven:

    When my mom comes to visit me in NJ, from Raleigh, she’s surprised that the people doing the landscaping work in my condo complex are not all Hispanics.

    The influx of Hispanics into the Southeast, over the last 20 years, really has changed things in small towns to bigger cities.

    Last time I was in Raleigh, I think there are two or three FM Spanish language stations.

    Really big shift compared to when I was growing up in the 1980’s.

  212. 212.

    ? Martin

    @Brachiator:

    We are all just having fun here speculating. But even the fantasy of Downton Abbey is instructive here. A certain class of people used to employ servants for all sorts of jobs, some we can no longer even imagine.

    But we still employ those people, we just distribute them more widely. Uber is a distributed chauffeur service. More people than ever have gardeners and housecleaners and sending their kids to tutors. Yes, we don’t employ them full time, we just hire them for a few hours per month but there are actually more people doing those kinds of jobs today than a century ago. The internet makes the transactional costs (hiring, interviewing, scheduling, payment) trivial, which is what was needed to make the marketplace function in this way. I can trust a bunch of customer reviews on a website and hire someone to clean my house in 5 minutes to be done tomorrow if something comes up unexpectedly. I can hire someone to pick me up in 15 minutes and take me across town, and know that they are reliable.

    People used to things that sales clerks in stores were essential. Now, there are people who detest the idea of going to the store and wasting time on petty human interactions and order all their stuff through Amazon.

    And the counter to that is Apple’s 40,000 retail employees. Apple determined that their customers wanted the security of buying a high-value product from someone who could competently answer their questions and provide service in-person. Apple puts particular focus on that human-human interaction with very high staffing levels and the elimination of traditional efficiency efforts such as checkout lines. And they have the highest revenue per square foot retail stores in the US by a factor of 3. They are tremendously popular. Apple’s Stores by themselves would be a top-20 retailer in the US – on par with a CVS.

    So yes, I don’t need to interact with someone when I’m buying CPG (consumer packaged goods). That box of Tide I bought last month hasn’t changed. But I might only buy a new phone every 2 years, and the last phone I bought is no longer sold. I want to try the new one, I want to ask questions, I want someone who can do more than tell me if its on sale, but who could tell me if it’ll work during my vacation in Mexico, or how do I set it up to share photos with my kids. What we’re doing is refining our behavior – taking those non-value add transactions and giving them to Amazon, but taking other retail activities and shifting them to a more-human interactive environment. Apple Stores are literally the most expensive place to buy the product, but a lot of people are willing to pay an extra $20 for the phone in order to get their questions answered. They aren’t willing to pay Walmart a penny to buy Tide there, though, because there’s no value being returned. And Apple isn’t the only place where this is happening, but again it tends to be non-commoditized products/services and non-necessities.

    Barbershops for men seem to be in steep decline. Nail places are popular here and there, but were practically non-existent 30 years ago. Taste is capricious, not rigidly subject to the theory that you are proposing.

    Yes, it’s capricious, so you can’t look too narrowly. The barbershop might be giving way to the health club or as the nail salon as you note. Two christmases ago there was an unexpected downturn in apparel sales that mystified a lot of analysts. Turns out people were deciding that a new iPhone was better at doing the job of buying a new pair of shoes – Apple took revenue directly off of clothing and accessory makers. Nobody anticipated that could happen because they are such different markets, but people don’t own 12 pairs of shoes because they are all functionally different. Some of those are fashion, or just a reward for working hard, and some people decided that a new iPhone did that job better. Once you move into discretionary spending, you get a lot of capriciousness, but that spending still goes somewhere and it tends to go toward more labor-oriented, human-human things. You take the Uber instead of a bus, or you go to the nail salon, or you go out to eat more, etc. and these are things that are harder to automate away because it’s more often the social component that is being hired.

  214. 214.

    Calouste

    @Brachiator:

    A certain class of people used to employ servants for all sorts of jobs, some we can no longer even imagine.

    One of the things I read about that was that the butler would welcome guests to the house, but he wouldn’t actually open the door to them. A footman would do that.

  215. 215.

    kc

    Literally LOL. It’s all fun and games until they become sentient.

    Now let me go back and see what everyone is arguing about in the preceding comments …

  216. 216.

    geg6

    @Calouste:

    If you ever saw (or can catch) the Downton Abbey specials about the manners and workings of great homes and those who lived in them, there are all kinds of arcane rules for both the aristocracy who owned the manors and the servants who ran them. Really nit picky, tiny little details that were of the utmost importance. Can’t remember the guy’s name, but all these specials feature the guy in charge of all of the authenticity in the show. Really amazing stuff. Can’t imagine having to deal with it, whether I was Upstairs or Downstairs.

  217. 217.

    Mnemosyne

    @geg6:

    As with most immigration patterns, it has a lot to do with who knows someone who’s already moved to a particular area. If your cousin twice removed immigrated to a Philly suburb and is doing well there, you’re going to be more likely to move there than to a place where you don’t know anyone.

  218. 218.

    Ruckus

    @Paul in KY:
    Generally just starve?
    Don’t think I even implied that anywhere. And in another comment I made the point that if too many people have nothing to do and no way to even feed themselves they will find a way. Usually a violent way. IOW we are in agreement that long term unemployment of more than a small portion of the public is bad, very bad. Especially for those with everything to lose. (That’s not to imply that long term unemployment is good for a small or any portion actually, it’s just there is always a tipping point)

  219. 219.

    Robert Sneddon

    @Calouste: The butler was the manager of a house staff, not a manservant. A bachelor like, for example, Bertie Wooster had a manservant like Jeeves who was definitely not a butler and didn’t perform the role in Wooster’s household. There would be a housemaid who cleaned and possibly a cook who “did for” the young gentleman but it might have been a job she shared with other gents.

    I live in a block of flats in Edinburgh that was built for solid working-class families (lawyers, doctors, people who earned money by working rather than living off estate rents) around 1860 or so. The top floor in the attic space was servant’s living quarters but each flat had a small room for a live-in scullery-maid or boot-boy who performed the basic cleaning and carrying tasks for the flat’s owners (the coal cellar was in the basement, the water supply was from a municipal pump some way away as was the sluice for the chamberpots). The servants in the top attic were lady’s maids, manservants and cooks as well as grooms for the carriages and horses stabled behind the flats (that area is now a car hire place, of all things). The cooks and grooms would be shared between the owners of the flats as needed. There would be no footmen per se but another flat’s maid or manservant could be hired for the night if a formal dinner was being laid on by someone in the block of flats. No-one would have had a butler though as their establishments would not be generous enough to require one.

    Round the corner from us are town-house crescents, the city homes of landed gentry which did have footmen and butlers. These are elegant three-story terraced houses which would have had a downstairs establishment of at least six servants, one of which would be a butler.

  220. 220.

    NotMax

    @Calouste

    Interesting (though took leeway with being socially and culturally accurate, especially when it came to what was permitted behavior among the downstairs servants) was the British reality series Manor House in which a score of people were assigned roles in an Edwardian house from the very top of the ladder to the lowest rung and lived the life of 1905.

    Poor guy assigned the position of Hallboy definitely got the short end of the stick.

  222. 222.

    Ruckus

    @Paul in KY:
    Not every business owner is a complete asshole in the mold of Trump or the Koch brothers either. There are good people running businesses. They may be vastly outnumbered by the assholes and douchebag wannabes but they do exist. A business does have to survive in it’s field to pay any wages/benefits. There is competition, except in very, very few cases for most all businesses. That we are currently in a place where larger businesses have an oversized say in the competitiveness of everyone else may be true. The world’s largest employer and one of the worst, Walmart, has competition, some of it is kicking their ass. Most cable/internet suppliers have no competition in any one area and yet act like predatory pricing and crappy product is competitive.

  223. 223.

    Brachiator

    @? Martin:

    But we still employ those people, we just distribute them more widely. Uber is a distributed chauffeur service. More people than ever have gardeners and housecleaners and sending their kids to tutors.

    Again, just not true. Uber is a taxi service, and may be killing jobs even as it creates new ones. In Southern California, there is a decline in gardeners and housecleaners, related to the decline of middle class jobs.

    And the larger issue is that as, for example, great houses disappeared, the jobs also vanished. The people were not employed anymore by the lords and ladies. The same is true of other industries. In the US, Craigslist wiped out hundreds of thousands of newspaper jobs related to classified and retail advertising.

    BTW, the Internet does not yield employees that you know are reliable, and it is absurd to think that online customer reviews are reliable or honest. Some are even planted by the companies.

    Apple’s retail employees are a niche. Gateway, Microsoft, Samsung have all failed, and established retailers like Best Buy are barely hanging on. Department stores continue to go out of business as people get used to buying online. And who was that Apple exec who was going to save JC Penney?

    People thought they always would want people ringing up their groceries and bagging the stuff they bought. Supermarkets are experimenting with eliminating these jobs. Again, the bottom line and inescapable fact is that jobs involving human interaction are disappearing, and we get used to it.
    We would get used to more robots and devices doing similar jobs.

    Discretionary spending is declining as incomes and employment decline. People used to spend about 30 percent of their food budget eating at restaurants, etc. Folks just can’t afford it. Eateries go out of business, and McDonalds and Del Taco adjust their Dollar menus to fight for customers.

  224. 224.

    trollhattan

    @? Martin:
    IIUC big rigs have a two- or three-cycle lifespan, beginning new with the big-name haulers and corporations, then sold to independents and when too tatty for them, and sold again either to single-rig owners or out of the country. How many years that may total I have not clue one.

    I can certainly respect what Google has done to date and also hear whisperings that Tesla has a hell of a lot more self-driving capability baked in than they’ve activated, but my suspicion is full autonomy, presuming that’s the gold standard, remains distant due to the fraction of a percent of situations no adaptive programming can untangle. It’s why we’ll continue to have flight crews long after the planes are fully capable of complete unmanned flights.

    Aging boomers will push like hell to get them on the market, to retain their independence. It’s an interesting possibility for convicted DUIs–what if the court restricted them to autonomous cars only?

  225. 225.

    goblue72

    @gene108: German companies are “used to unions” because there are unions with power they have long been forced to deal with. Dollars to donuts, if German business executives could get the public to agree to reduce the power of unions legislatively (like the economic elites have convinced the public in the U.S.), they would.

    German management is not somehow culturally different than us, or do this out of the good of their hearts. They do it due to power relationships.

    But please, y’all just keep tugging those forelocks.

  226. 226.

    Yutsano

    @Brachiator:

    I have a friend who had quite a relationship with the UPS guy who used to deliver packages to her office. But that’s a story for another day.

    OH COME ON!!!

  227. 227.

    Yutsano

    @goblue72:

    But please, y’all just keep tugging those forelocks.

    Jesus dude. You’re gonna have to rethink your political positions for doing something THAT clueless.

  228. 228.

    glory b

    @geg6: That’s because at the time when the Hispanic population was increasing, we were losing our manufacturing base and there wasn’t any reason to move here if there weren’t any jobs.

    Also, this is the reason why Pittsburgh has one of the most wealthy and well educated Hispanic communities in the country.

  229. 229.

    glory b

    @gene108: Yep, we didn’t have construction going on, and there wasn’t anything like that to draw them in.

    Now, there’s more construction going on, and more Hispanics. This Xmas, I worked at the East Liberty (formerly depressed area, doing a bit of booming now) Target store and saw a surprising number of Hispanic shoppers.

    Of course, the downside is a lot of frustration in the local black community, with almost 50% unemployment for young black males, who are wondering why they can’t seem to get any of the jobs, even as unskilled laborers.

    And we have a really progressive mayor now, and I hope we can see more employment like this. A friend of mine spoke to the mayor’s chief of staff and asked about jobs for the kids in the city and got information about a training program for retail jobs. OK, but they want to get in the construction field, which, as I said, is booming now.

    Nothing against a new Hispanic population, because Pittsburgh needs more warm bodies here, but I really hurt for the black kids here, lots of them feel shut out.

  230. 230.

    ? Martin

    @Brachiator:

    Uber is a taxi service, and may be killing jobs even as it creates new ones. In Southern California, there is a decline in gardeners and housecleaners, related to the decline of middle class jobs.

    You’re trying to tell me the are fewer gardeners today than there were in the 1920s?

    And Uber isn’t quite a taxi service because there is no permanent hiring arrangement for labor (which means workers set more of their terms) and because the consumer has much more say in what they are hiring. You can reject a driver or you can broadly select the kind of vehicle you need (SUV, etc). And most importantly, the markets aren’t bound by a specific corporate profitability assessment. The markets are much more organic, which means there are markets that taxis underserved which Uber is able to respond to, almost immediately. But it serves a much more personal role than a taxi does.

    In the US, Craigslist wiped out hundreds of thousands of newspaper jobs related to classified and retail advertising.

    And the internet created just as many new jobs in other areas. They may not have been suitable to the person doing classified paste-up, but new jobs emerged, and most were better jobs.

    Apple’s retail employees are a niche. Gateway, Microsoft, Samsung have all failed, and established retailers like Best Buy are barely hanging on. Department stores continue to go out of business as people get used to buying online. And who was that Apple exec who was going to save JC Penney?

    They other product failed because they weren’t interested in doing what Apple is doing. They weren’t going to support Microsoft or Google’s software in-person or other 3rd party services, and they were much more driven to provide a traditional retail experience around more commoditized products. That Gateway doesn’t even exist while Apple continues to gain PC marketshare by selling higher priced products suggests that consumers are attracted to the service experience with Apple over the lower cost/worse service experience of their competitors. But other retailers are doing similarly well. REI always had this kind of a service experience and hasn’t contracted like other retailers. Ron Johnson hoped to transform JC Penny, but it was probably too big an ask for such a large established retailer.

    BTW, the Internet does not yield employees that you know are reliable, and it is absurd to think that online customer reviews are reliable or honest. Some are even planted by the companies.

    Considering there is no incentive for a cab driver to provide a good experience because there is no review at all, I would disagree that online reviews are worse than nothing.

    People thought they always would want people ringing up their groceries and bagging the stuff they bought. Supermarkets are experimenting with eliminating these jobs. Again, the bottom line and inescapable fact is that jobs involving human interaction are disappearing, and we get used to it.

    Sure, like I agreed above, its capricious. Bagging groceries might be out, but GrubHub takes its place. I’m not saying it’s easy on the workers to have this kind of market fluidity but automation doesn’t mean the elimination of work – just a shift of it.

    Discretionary spending is declining as incomes and employment decline. People used to spend about 30 percent of their food budget eating at restaurants, etc. Folks just can’t afford it. Eateries go out of business, and McDonalds and Del Taco adjust their Dollar menus to fight for customers.

    That’s just not true. People were spending 30 of their budget at the grocery store. A gallon of milk in 1920 cost $8.50 in 2015 dollars. A dozen eggs was $9. I can buy them even here in hippy cage-free California for $2.99 or less. The price of food is massively cheaper, again due to automation. And people just didn’t eat out often. 50 years ago most people would only go out for special occasions – holidays, etc. Now it’s monthly or even weekly for most people. The dollar menu is simply competing for non-consumption – trying to encourage people to eat out that otherwise won’t by making it close to the same price. But we spend 12% of our income on food, and we eat out more. What we eat while out is worse, but that’s because it’s trying to be price competitive with groceries – particularly protein off the dollar menu. It’s hard to beat 2 $1 double cheeseburgers for protein/$. Restaurants could never reliably compete with groceries in terms of cost in the past, now they can get pretty close.

    But there are more restaurants per capita now than ever before. It’s actually part of the reason why we have gotten so unhealthy as a nation (though that’s now improving).

  231. 231.

    ? Martin

    @trollhattan:

    I can certainly respect what Google has done to date and also hear whisperings that Tesla has a hell of a lot more self-driving capability baked in than they’ve activated, but my suspicion is full autonomy, presuming that’s the gold standard, remains distant due to the fraction of a percent of situations no adaptive programming can untangle. It’s why we’ll continue to have flight crews long after the planes are fully capable of complete unmanned flights.

    I think there are fewer of those situations than you realize. We saw that back during the DARPA challenges. Here are the rules for the 2007 urban challenge:

    Basic Rules for 2007[edit]
    Vehicle must be stock or have a documented safety record.
    Vehicle must obey the California state driving laws.
    Vehicle must be entirely autonomous, using only the information it detects with its sensors and public signals such as GPS.
    DARPA will provide the route network 24 hours before the race starts.
    Vehicles will complete the route by driving between specified checkpoints.
    DARPA will provide a file detailing the order the checkpoints must be driven to 5 minutes before the race start.
    Vehicles may “stop and stare” for at most 10 seconds.
    Vehicles must operate in rain and fog, with GPS blocked.
    Vehicles must avoid collision with vehicles and other objects such as carts, bicycles, traffic barrels, and objects in the environment such as utility poles.
    Vehicles must be able to operate in parking areas and perform U-turns as required by the situation.

    Several teams finished the 60 mile course. And this was nearly 10 years ago with completely shit sensors and computational power and much less progressed machine learning. Everything used in 2007 is now fully miniaturized and commoditized. Single chip LIDAR should hit the market in the next year. The main obstacle to having it now is that every company specialized in their own area and they are uninteresting in sharing. But the big tech firms are going to blow right past that – Google is basically there and should be fully there in the next few years. Tesla isn’t far off. Apple is rumored to be roughly where Tesla is.

    But the big rig lifecycle may go straight out the window if the cost savings of a new tech are good enough. Smaller firms won’t be able to afford it, but anyone with adequate capital could just buy a fleet of trucks and send them on their way. You’re certainly going to see the big outfits do this and they’ll put tremendous pressure on the indy drivers because they’ll be outbid by the companies with minimal marginal cost on making the next run – basically just fuel. And I wouldn’t be shocked if the rig was just a fuckton of batteries for mass. Electric motors are pretty much all torque anyway. Keeps them off the road for a while while charging, which is a big downside, but fuel costs then also drop through the floor.

  232. 232.

    mclaren

    @? Martin:

    Quite simply we spend less money on stuff than we used to. Period.

    Martin is lying to you, as usual.

    Rents have skyrocketed after adjusting for inflation over the last 25 years:
    https://www.nmhc.org/uploadedImages/Final_Govt_Affairs_Research_Insight_Content/Newsletters-Research_Notes/CPI%20Rent.jpg

    Median U.S. incomes have dropped after adjusting for inflation:
    http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/imageroot/2015/09/median%20income%20since%201995.jpg

    College tuition has risen at a rate five times faster than housing prices, and housing prices have soared at a much faster rate than inflation:
    http://priceonomics.com/static/images/college-one/Tuition_Rise_Inflation_Resize.png

    Health care costs have zoomed after adjusting for inflation. Almost everything is fantastically more expensive today than in 1970, after adjusting for inflation, except for electronic toys and communications media.

    The claim Martin makes that “technology will create more jobs than it destroys” is the “lump of labor fallacy.” But it turns out that fallacy is itself a fallacy, as Larry Summers points out:

    “When I was an MIT undergraduate in the early 1970s, a young economics student was exposed to the debate about automation. There were two factions in those debates. There were the stupid Luddite people, who mostly were outside of economics departments, and there were the smart progressive people, who at that time were personified by Bob Solow. The stupid people thought that automation was going to make all the jobs go away and there wasn’t going to be any work to do. And the smart people understood that when more was produced, there would be more income and therefore there would be more demand. It wasn’t possible that all the jobs would go away, so automation was a blessing. I was taught that the smart people were right. Until a few years ago, I didn’t think this was a very complicated subject; the Luddites were wrong and the believers in technology and technological progress were right. I’m not so completely certain now. … In the United States today a higher fraction of the workforce receives disability insurance than does production work in manufacturing. (Many workers in the manufacturing sector are not production workers.) … I think it is also fair to say that the evolution and growth of disability insurance is substantially driven also by the technological and social changes that are leading to a smaller fraction of the workforce working. At the same time, as has famously and repeatedly been noted, the share of income going to the top one percent of our population has steadily increased.”

    Source: “Were the Luddites correct?” 14 July 2015.

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