This is a linkpost for http://www.mauldineconomics.com/frontlinethoughts/men-without-work
So what?
Generic socio-economic research is generic socio-economic research. Why should LW care?
Seems like it should have major policy implications, and forecasting input. If we are expecting to have 25% of the prime producing age males not actually producing anything, and draining resources, we should look at the implications the same way we look at automation displacement.
That 45% displacement from automation, combined with 25% convicts, seems to overshadow any productivity gains possible from tech improvements. And those "yuge" job creation numbers, are not even keeping up with births in the US.
So, is possible we have to go to UBI, at least temporarily , just to keep from social disruption of starving, angry and (some) violent, people.
A lot of people are saying re-training and edu are the answer, but a recent study showed that there just wasn't enough improvement, in a limited time frame, to make a difference. Plenty of 45 year olds learning to code doesn't seem to be helping much. And there are plenty of 30-40 yr olds working at Taco Bell, taking youngsters entry level work, so it's easy to see they aren't going to even keep trying to find work. (didn't save paper, sorry.)
You haven't answered the question.
LW is a specialized website/forum/community. Each day a vast torrent of news engulfs us -- Susan Rice was involved in wiretapping Trump, NBER published a paper on the value of flexible work using the example of Uber drivers, a cute puppy got its tummy scratched. LW ignores almost all of it and for good reasons. Randomly pulling out pieces of flotsam and jetsam streaming past and plopping them into LW is not a particularly useful activity.
I am hoping some of the brilliant people in this community can come up with some good ideas on the future of work, employment , displacement and AI.
I understand that most folks here are the recipients of the benefits higher education, and further, that the logic and reasoning employed on problems and predictive models could be beneficial to examining these economic questions.
I guess you think i am just posting chaff, and adding to the noise level?
I am trying to post links to tools and databases, x-risk, AI and ML that i havn't seen discussed, and econ ramifications of AI. The discussions of late on that last one are all styled on the UBI argument right now, but they seem to be closely enough related to be useful in thinking thru some of the possibilities and restrictions of different models.
Is there another group that i should be annoying that is looking at these topics that i havn't found on the web?
I am hoping some of the brilliant people in this community can come up with some good ideas on the future of work, employment
Yeah, no. The general level of understanding economics here is pretty bad.
most folks here are the recipients of the benefits higher education
I guess you think i am just posting chaff, and adding to the noise level?
I think you're posting random things which happen to catch your interest but which are not the focus of this forum and so they don't get much traction.
Is there another group that i should be annoying
I don't know of decent economic forums (which didn't devolve into YAY BLUE! and occasionally YAY RED!), but I haven't looked very hard. Marginal Revolution is a good place, but it's a blog with comments, not a forum.
So, is possible we have to go to UBI, at least temporarily
I'm kinda drawing the opposite conclusion from this sort of thing. If so many people are willing to just drop out of the labor force even in the absence of much support from government (since most forms of welfare are strictly limited in time, and not generally focused on young single men anyway), clearly the prospect of being "exploited" by an unscrupulous employer is not nearly as big of a problem as we used to think.
So what we need actually is to: (1) consolidate most forms of time-limited welfare into a single benefit that would work mostly like unemployment-insurance; (2) slash taxes on low-paid work (or equivalently, expand the EITC), as an efficient form of income redistribution that doesn't need anything like the sort of commitment from government that UBI does; (3) gradually deregulate the labor market, and stand ready to pivot to something more like a UBI if such deregulation does result in a deteriorated bargaining position for workers.
If the labor market keeps functioning smoothly, I don't think "social disruption of starving, angry and (some) violent, people" will be an issue. People, even starving people, will take up good jobs long before they resort to anger and violence!
I am thinking the first thing to do, is to completely remove income taxes on hourly workers. Would give an instant rise in velocity of money in the most local way, remove a burden from small business, and allow the IRS to focus on the larger corps, who are tending to offshore profits as well as people.
EITC seems like a good policy action, but as it is retro-active, it sure doesn't seem to put money in your pocket, it just keeps the Gov from taking more out.
As to unemployment funds, seems like if employers had to pick up employees half, but were allowed to earn interest on those deposits to their accounts (perhaps into a pension fund?), both would still have a decent incentive to make it work, unless a economy wide depression pops.
As to taking up "good jobs", there just aren't any around here anymore.
Used to be, you could always get a labouring job on a residential building crew, and at least get good skills for your later home ownership. That is gone now (at least in the US West, with some big exceptions), so is roadwork/infrastructure gigs in smaller communities. Those jobs are all bid on by big Regional players, who bring in an entire crew, and hire flagmen and hoseholders only locally.
The other "good jobs" in FIRE businesses are squarely in the sights of AI, a lot of the folks who were in RE, are some of the newly unemployed. We are seeing a LOT of small commercial RE office spaces coming available around here too, so white collar is the next crises point.
Only thing is see growing is gov jobs, especially National Sec, and MIIC related. Machinists are in great demand now, but with 5 axis grinders, 3D printers, and robotics, that isn't drawing much re-training interest, except for CAD design, which will go to Augmented Vision soon. The other growth in gov jobs is in econ support, and a lot of those jobs are un-filled as they require spanish speakers !
Why should LW care?
Seems like it should have major policy implications, and forecasting input.
That's why humans should care, not why it's specially relevant to the topics of LW.
My answer is to build open source machines that provide for human survival: http://tlalexander.com/machine/
It's interesting that your discussion of utopias and dystopias has a section "Enter: Communism", but has no section "Exit: Communism". One might think that this arrangement was never tried in real life.
Is your machine what's traditionally knows as a nanoassembler (aka nanofactory, molecular assembler, etc.)?
"As we shall see, a single variable – having a criminal record – is a key missing piece in explaining why work rates and LFPRs have collapsed much more dramatically in America than other affluent Western societies over the past two generations. This single variable also helps explain why the collapse has been so much greater for American men than women and why it has been so much more dramatic for African American men and men with low educational attainment than for other prime-age men in the United States."
"Crime rates in America today are thought to be more or less back to levels of the early 1960s. Incarceration rates, on the other hand, are roughly five times as high today as they were in the late 1960s.
As a direct consequence of crime and punishment trends since the 1960s, American society now contains a truly vast, if generally invisible, army of noninstitutionalized felons and ex-prisoners. These are overwhelmingly adult men convicted of serious criminal offenses who have been punished with prison time or probation, but who are now part of our general population."
sorta related:
Race and Wrongful Convictions in the United States. UC Irvine: National Registry of Exonerations.
African-Americans are only 13% of the American population but a majority of innocent defendants wrongfully convicted of crimes and later exonerated. They constitute 47% of the 1,900 exonerations listed in the National Registry of Exonerations (as of October 2016), and the great majority of more than 1,800 additional innocent defendants who were framed and convicted of crimes in 15 large-scale police scandals and later cleared in “group exonerations”.
pdf: www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Race_and_Wrongful_Convictions.pdf
Sorta related again, being charged for the "services" of the courts, and sometimes reparations, plus 12% interest. Ouch
https://psmag.com/legal-financial-obligations-are-the-new-debtors-prison-5e9c4f0fab83
"Today, in Washington state (where Harris conducted her research), you can be charged not only for victim’s restitution, but for bench warrants, clerks, court-appointed attorneys, lab analyses, juries, drug funds, incarcerations, emergency responses, extraditions, convictions, collections, drug and alcohol assessments and treatments, supervisions, house arrests, and, of course, interest. These charges are levied even on minors and, in some cases, defendants found innocent."