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I love this epically wrong response. Where will all those laid off people go...."Walmart". "uhmmm...dude we just got laid off from Walmart...."
People just dont get it. When Automation can do everything you do in every way BETTER.....theres no new jobs.
The bottom 10% of our society is viewed as unemployable. The mentally challenged, and damaged. We dont even count them for unemployment. Thats automation. Used to be SOMETHING would be found for them. "Go pull weeds" if nothing else.
then came automation in the 1900's. Suddenly those 10%...not so useful. We pass social security and other things to help them eventually. And all is well.
But automations going to make those walmart workers useless. And they're going to be the new not usefull people. they aren't going to find new jobs because they just arent good enough to compete.
2040-50% of the types of people employed today...will have no skills making them employable. From now until then we will see less and less people employed.
Jeff Bezos who runs Amazon is moving to replace the stock men and order fufillment people with robots and even replace the UPS or FedEx people with flying drones that wiill fly up to your front door and drop off your Amazon package. The only thing poor Mr Bezos hasn't gotten his brain around is how to replace his customers with robots or how to cut his prices down so people with no incomes can buy his stuff.
i do too. i believe at some point it becomes cheaper to pay poor people off so they don't riot. we aren't there yet, though.
the u.s. is going to have serious problems in the future if it keeps providing financial incentives for poor, uneducated people to breed faster than wealthy, educated people.
So what is your solution for this problem ,is it taking a page from Heinrich Himmlers play book. In 1944 with far less technology just one of his death facillities could kill 15,000 a day and dispose of the remains. We could do much better today don't you think.
Wutitz has done great work in this thread. And I think he has the correct view. When we went from 80% of us growing the food to 2%, we did not end up with 78% unemployment. This time is NOT different. We can't know what all those people will be doing, but it is a safe bet to think that the vast majority of them will have new jobs, ones we have not even dreamed of yet.
Your point about how things have worked out in the past is noted and follows in the line of economic greats like Shumpeter who introducted the concept of creative destruction. It relyes on a optimistic view of technology and how capitalism reacts to it. The argument is logically flawed because it assumes that the past is prolog and this is a valid assumption. It may NOT be true or even a valid assumption. For example, it was noted on CNBC that a study of the long term unemployed done last year indicated that of the long term unemployed over age 50 only 11% were able to find full time paying jobs. The rest i.e. 89% were leaving the economy i.e retiring regardless of whether their finances were adequate or not or scraping by on subsistence level jobs , qualifying for our meger welfare benefits, joining the ranks of the disabled or relying on their families to get by until they can retire at age 62. This is why the total number of people in our economy is slowly shrinking. I am one who thinks "This time is VERY different".
As long as those still working are willing to pay for them to sit home without a job, then that's what they'll do.
Guess what those people sitting at home are not fighting you for your job or competing with you for that shrinking pool of work. In fact some of those people sitting in those unemployment lines might be willing to work at your job for a fraction of the salary or benefits you are now getting. So I think you are better off letting a sleeping dog lie, you do your job and pay some of your salary in taxes to provide a subsistence living for the unemployed so this horrible day never comes when you either see your wages or other compensation slashed or you join the unemployment lines where you will have plenty of company because someone would do your job for 50% less ages or even do your job on consignment. .
Last edited by mwruckman; 03-20-2014 at 11:00 PM..
If you remember Stanley Kubrick's 2001:A Space Oddessy man's first tool was put to use killing one of Moonwatcher's rivals and taking possession of a water hole on some desolate East African Savanna some 3 million years ago. When UN Secretary General U Thant attended a screening of this very movie at UN Headquarters in 1968, he was heard to say that the above act in the movie illustrated where all of his problems as a man trying to make the world a peaceful place began in the first place!
Maybe, maybe not. Its possible that goods we now consider luxuries will become more common place, but the thing is we have a lot of goods as it is. You might disagree, but I would see the ideal of new innovation as resulting in a society that focuses more on promoting work life balance and quality of life over productivity, but that would seem to be directly at odds with capitalism which rewards productivity in businesses above all.
So do we let capitalism stand in the way of a more perfect society and one where everybody feels they belong and are part of team or do we now?
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