In terms of actually existing politics, which do you think people in general would dislike least: subsidizing would-be freeloaders with taxpayer money, or using that same taxpayer money to hire people (or subsidize hiring people) to do largely unproductive jobs that the market wouldn’t pay them a living wage to do? There seems to be a general feeling that it’s wrong to let people (figuratively) starve, but also that it’s bad to give people things they don’t deserve.
If the answer is “I think people in general would rather make people work for their money, even if the work itself isn’t actually worth what we’re paying” then we might as well let Wal-Mart do the hiring rather than have the government do it directly.
(Aside: The textbook example of unproductive make-work is digging ditches and filling them in again. A slightly less obviously ridiculous way to employ low-skilled workers is as “taxi drivers” for people who would rather spend their daily commute doing something other than driving but wouldn’t go to the expense of hiring a driver themselves. After all, driving is a skill that most adults actually do have...)
Imagine that you are designing a Prisonner’s Dilemma game. When all the numbers are ready, you have an additional option to increase the reward for defecting when the opponent cooperates. Would you do it?
If you expect that the player’s future decisions are already fixed and your numbers will not change them, then increasing the reward adds more value to some players, while removing value from none. Thus it would be good to increase the reward.
But if you expect that people look at the payoff matrix and choose accordingly, increasing the reward for defecting will lead to less cooperation. By increasing the reward for defecting, you are reducing cooperation… and it’s not obvious what will be the result.
Now let’s add another complication. Let’s assume that some players’ voting mechanisms are broken, so they always vote to defect, and are unable to change that. It feels moral to punish those who defect voluntarily, but it feels immoral to punish those who merely randomly received a broken voting mechanism. -- I am speaking about people who are too stupid to do the kind of work that is important in a modern society. As opposed to people who could do the work, but are too lazy, if the system allows them. Both of them are mixed in the category of unemployed, with no easy way to distinguish between them.
Unfortunately, trying to set the numbers so that no one chooses this option voluntarily, and yet those who don’t have an option of escaping it are treated well… seems like a contradiction.
(There is a sci-fi “Limes inferior” about a society where all people have to do public IQ tests, and those above some value are legally required to work, while those below the value are not. Everyone gets a basic income, the smart people get a bonus for being smart, and the working people get another bonus for work.)
trying to set the numbers so that no one chooses this option voluntarily, and yet those who don’t have an option of escaping it are treated well… seems like a contradiction.
I think I’m missing your point.
It seems that one approach to this is for me to treat everyone well whether they work or not, and for me to provide additional incentives to people for doing the kind of work I want people to perform. This admittedly does not have the structure of a Prisoners Dilemma game, but I’m not sure why the PD structure is important.
If I find that some people who are capable of doing that work consistently choose not to under my incentive structure, I can experiment with my incentive structure… different people are best motivated by different things, after all.
If despite that I still find that some people who are capable of doing that work consistently choose not to… well, that means less of the work I want people to perform will get done than if they chose otherwise. Which might be a huge problem, if that work is much more valuable than the stuff they choose to do.
I have a bunch of options at that point. E.g., I can figure out other ways to get that work done (e.g. automation). Or I can figure out ways to force people to do that work.
Or I can rethink my initial conditions and stop treating everyone well whether they work or not… I can instead treat people well if they do the work I want done, and poorly otherwise, and count on that differential treatment to provide the missing incentive.
But that last option is far from the only option, nor is it clear to me that it works better than the alternatives.
It seems that one approach to this is for me to treat everyone well whether they work or not, and for me to provide additional incentives to people for doing the kind of work I want people to perform.
This seems to me almost what we have now. Yes, there is a problem about defining “treating well”. However well you treat one group of people, if you treat everyone else better, the former will complain. These days in first-world countries the unemployed people are treated much better than an average working person was centuries ago. But that’s irrelevant. We see that they are treated worse than other people are today, therefore they are not treated well.
Even if you start treating poor people much better than they are treated now, even better than the average people are now, just wait 10, at most 20 years, and they will start comparing you to Hitler, if they see that someone else is treated even better.
I agree that we should experiment more. Preferably many different experiments in smaller regions, so it is easier to stop things when they go horribly wrong. Seems to me a good first step would be giving more independence to regions; decentralizing the state power.
Expanding on my “yup” above a little… it’s certainly conceivable that we could adopt an approach to defining “treating well” that isn’t entirely relative.
For example, nation A could assert that A’s unemployed people are being treated well if they have better conditions than the unemployed in nation B (by which standard the U.S. unemployed are generally treated well). Or that A’s unemployed people are being treated well if their children don’t demonstrate significantly higher levels of deficiency-based illnesses (due to malnutrition, exposure, etc.) than the children of their employed people. Or various other standards.
The difficulty I’d expect to face when proposing such a standard isn’t that the unemployed under it would be worse off than the employed and therefore I’m Hitler, it’s that most people have already written their bottom line about whether (for example) the U.S. unemployed are generally treated well, and evaluate the standard based on whether it gives the right answer to that question.
it’s certainly conceivable that we could adopt an approach to defining “treating well” that isn’t entirely relative
Yes, we could. And then some people would get political karma for insisting that this isn’t the true definition of treating well, and instead is just a part of conspiracy for oppressing people.
unemployed people are being treated well if their children don’t demonstrate significantly higher levels of deficiency-based illnesses (due to malnutrition, exposure, etc.) than the children of their employed people
I can imagine a situation where there are illnesses typically attributed to poverty (and some people get political karma for insisting on the poverty hypothesis), even if material poverty is not the cause. For example, you could give people tons of money to buy healthy food, and yet they could decide to spend it all on junk food and alcohol. You measure their childrens’ health, and it becomes obvious the children are not fed properly. This article describes it better than I could.
I agree that it would be great to have an absolute definition of “treating people well”, which could be reached, first in one country, and then perhaps globally. But I predict that the closer we would get to it, the more people would insist that it’s a wrong definition.
most people have already written their bottom line about whether (for example) the U.S. unemployed are generally treated well
I think that in a long term it’s even worse: the bottom line depends on information the people get. In a totalitarian state, you just have to insist that everything is great, and imprison everyone who says otherwise, and after a few years people will believe that it really is great. But if you have freedom of speech, someone will always make political karma by insisting that people should have more (who wouldn’t like that?), and that not having more is completely unbearable.
I am not convinced your article shows an example of “poverty” not being caused by real poverty.
The examples in the article tend to include both poverty-related factors and non-poverty-related factors. For instance, certainly failing to press charges against an abusive, criminal, boyfriend is something that can be done by someone of any income level, but on the other hand, poor people are more likely to steal money (like this boyfriend did), more likely to be unable to treat mental illness that might result in violence, and more likely to be frustrated in ways that lead to violence. In this case the guy was a burglar and had no job (poverty leads to no money and people with no money and no job are more likely to burgle). Those aren’t 100% due to poverty (clearly frustration at poverty is only a contributing factor to violence and the person won’t be violent unless something else predisposes him to violence), but poverty affects them at the margins. Not to mention that even though each individual decision to stay with a boyfriend who has no job is technically not poverty-related, poverty cumulatively leads to a high rate of joblessness.
Poor people are also less likely to be educated and therefore more likely to make poor life decisions.
Even buying junk food is related to poverty because junk food has a lower time expenditure than other food and time has a greater relative cost to poor people than to rich people—poor people often work long hours that leave them exhausted, must spend a lot of personal time on child care, etc. Poor people also are less likely to have a supermarket with cheap non-junk food within easy commute distance. Again, none of this is 100% caused by poverty—this just raises the relative cost of non-junk food, it doesn’t make it completely non-affordable—but it certainly has an effect.
Well, it’s complicated. For poor people, some “smart” options are not really possible. On the other hand, I also see many relatively rich people making the stupid options voluntarily. Poverty can cause “stupid” (from our point of view) choices, and also stupid choices can cause poverty.
I would like to see a society where no one is forced to make the “stupid” choice. (Organizations helping poor people to press charges against criminals, providing them food and refrigerators, etc.) But even in such society I expect many people making the stupid choices voluntarily. (And then complain about an unfair society. So if we could get halfway to such society, judging from people’s reactions it would seem there was no improvement.)
Even buying junk food is related to poverty because junk food has a lower time expenditure than other food and time has a greater relative cost to poor people than to rich people—poor people often work long hours that leave them exhausted, must spend a lot of personal time on child care, etc.
A while back, a friend of mine informed me that poorer Americans consume junk food because it’s one of the few pleasures aside from alcohol that’s easily and cheaply available to people of that socioeconomic stratum, and that what she referred to as “food politics” is therefore symptomatic of privilege.
It sounded like rationalization to me at the time, and I still find the availability and time constraint arguments more convincing, but she’d have had more personal experience than I.
Great article! In this specific case, replacing a state-subsidized work (if the author has one of those) with state-subsidized free time would be an obvious improvement. At least replacing one of these two jobs.
I am a bit confused because my first idea of a poor person is a person who can’t find a job, not a person who has two jobs (and therefore has no time to optimize their lives using the typical middle-class methods). I wonder how much should I update, and how much of this is a cultural difference. Or different kinds of poverty. Perhaps “having two jobs” is just a little bit higher economical level than “not having a job” (which explains why people keep doing it, instead of giving up). But maybe it’s something completely different than I am not aware of.
Reading the article again, I don’t quite understand why a person with two jobs complaining about a lack of time is also attending a school. Okay, it would make sense if the school is necessary for getting a better job in the future. But even then this is probably not a situation of a typical poor person.
EDIT: Everyone who was influenced by this article, please update! It is actually a hoax.
At least in the United States, less than 4% of households report under 5,000 USD in taxable income, while between 14% and 20% of households are defined as under the poverty line (depending on source). The official BLS numbers put it at 10.4 million people who are ‘working poor’, aka working or looking-for-work for half the year and also under the poverty line (pdf warning), and a little over three quarters of households under the poverty line have at least one person who fits into the “working poor” category. This is further complicated by income disparities and cost of living varying heavily from state-to-state: one can live much more comfortably on 20k in the midwest than on 40k in California.
Reading the article again, I don’t quite understand why a person with two jobs complaining about a lack of time is also attending a school. Okay, it would make sense if the school is necessary for getting a better job in the future.
A little over half of off-campus college students live under the poverty line, making up a significant part of total poverty . There’s a perception that a degree (and usually a four-year-degree) is necessary for any desirable “real” (non-retail non-fast food) job. Worse, there’s a perception that any degree is both necessary and sufficient for long-term “real” jobs. So you do get a lot of people trying to take classes and make ends meet at the same time, even if the system eventually shoves them out the door with a lot of student loans and a liberal arts degree that barely improves their options (or not even that: low-income folk who drop out get screwed even worse).
It’s probably not the average case, but it does make up a non-trivial portion of the total.
((On the other hand, many of the issues raised in the linked blog post show problems related to information access. “Sliding scale” payments usually mean nearly free for a low-income mother, in the odd case where she doesn’t qualify for Medicaid. The documentation necessary to set up even a post-9/11 bank account is less than that necessary to get most forms of public assistance including WIC or TANF, while there are other complex reasons people in poverty avoid bank accounts. It’s quite possible to cook basic staples with nothing more than a microwave, a plate, and a couple pieces of silverware, but that’s not really something that’s taught in Home Ec or cookbooks. And the depression self-diagnosis is… not robust.))
another emerging issue is that degrees can have a negative utility these days. if your degree can’t land you a “real” job, and employers who would otherwise take you now see you as ‘overqualified’, your options are more limited than if you never went to college in the first place.
I am a bit confused because my first idea of a poor person is a person who can’t find a job, not a person who has two jobs
I’ve spent a fair amount of time volunteering in fairly poor communities, and i my experience, many of the people living in those areas work multiple part-time jobs, some “official” some under-the-table.
In the US at least, statistics bare this out- even 45% of homeless people have worked a job in the last week (much fewer have regular jobs, because of the nature of homelessness). 13% have regular jobs (are working poor). ~25% or so of people below the poverty line are working poor, and the fraction has been increasing. I imagine if you include under-the-table jobs, its much higher.
My idea of a poor person is not someone without a job, but someone without money. Not having a job is one contributing factor to being poor, not part of the definition.
If you want to help poor people, and the only information you have is that they literally are without money, the only conclusion you can get from this data is that if you give them some money, you will make them less poor… well, at least in the short term.
Having information about how specifically these people are and remain poor shows opportunities for other interventions, some of which might be more effective. Thus I would like to know the most frequent “templates” for poverty.
The linked article describes a person who studies and works at two jobs, and lives in an area far away from many useful or cheap things. This can give some specific ideas about helping them. For example giving them enough money to keep only one job; or providing them a free ride to the nearest city. Some of these ideas may be more effective than others; for example if there are more people in the same area with the same problem, you could drive them to the city together by bus, instead of each of them in a separate car. Or a big refrigerator shared among multiple families. Or an advice about how to solve unusual situations that happen once in a while and they have no time to research.
Then there are people who are poor because they don’t have a job, and don’t even have the education necessary for the job. In that case, completely different specific ideas may be helpful; for example providing them the education or a simple work experience they could mention at a job interview. Or educating their children for free if they fail to understand something at school. Or perhaps teaching them how to do something useful for themselves and their neighbors, if free time is not a constraint. There are possible projects where they provide the work, and you pay for the materials and tools they need. Etc.
I always imagined the latter to be a typical example, and didn’t think much about the former. Now that I think about it, all the information I have on the former are from USA, while I have a lot of information on the latter from my country, so maybe it’s something country-specific. But maybe it’s just my limited information.
EDIT: The original article which inspired these thoughts was a hoax, so whatever conclusions were built on the provided information are extremely unreliable.
This seems to me almost what we have now. Yes, there is a problem about defining “treating well”.
Yup.
I agree that we should experiment more.
I’m all in favor of experimentation.
And if we’re already experimenting to the limits of our existing regional independence, such that increased independence will relax the rate-limiting constraint on experimentation (which I doubt we are, but is I suppose possible), then yes, increased regional independence would make sense as a next step. Though perhaps it’s best to do so in a small region, so it’s easier to stop things if it goes horribly wrong.
Of course, if we believe for other reasons that decentralizing state power is a good idea, then we should endorse doing so for other reasons, but that’s something of a nonsequitor.
Now let’s add another complication. Let’s assume that some players’ voting mechanisms are broken, so they always vote to defect, and are unable to change that. It feels moral to punish those who defect voluntarily, but it feels immoral to punish those who merely randomly received a broken voting mechanism. -- I am speaking about people who are too stupid to do the kind of work that is important in a modern society. As opposed to people who could do the work, but are too lazy, if the system allows them. Both of them are mixed in the category of unemployed, with no easy way to distinguish between them.
/me shrugs
Disability screening in the real world isn’t perfect, but it works at least tolerably well. (“Tolerably”, in this case, means that nobody appears to be making a political issue out of it not working.)
nobody appears to be making a political issue out of it not working.
It is an issue in the UK—the conservative government made a big issue about it, because it turned out that (off the top of my head) 75% of those on disability benefits were actually fit for either full or part-time work.
I used to have rock-paper-scissor preferences for that kind of thing (if A = “John is paid to do nothing, i.e. basic income guarantee”, B = “John is paid to do something useless, e.g. digging ditches and filling them again”, and C = “John is not paid at all”, I preferred B to A to C to B). I realized that and forced myself to resolve this when reading this post and its comment thread.
The traditional argument for B over A (that is, make-work over basic income) used to be that idleness is a vice and industriousness a virtue; that it is better to work than to sit on your ass. This seems like a lost purpose, though — the reason that work is usually better than idleness is that work accomplishes something useful. Work without purpose features prominently in depictions of hell, from the myth of Sisyphus to The Far Side.
A fourth alternative, D, might be “John is paid to take classes and learn skills.” John enrolls in art school and learns to make decorative pottery; or goes to math school and learns category theory; or goes to woodsman school and learns to build log cabins and tan squirrel hides; or goes to media-critic school and learns to write essays about reality television; or something else. Sure, there may not be a lot of demand for potters and squirrel leather, but that’s okay since the robots provide pretty much everything there is demand for.
However, I realize that in proposing D, I’m probably exposing my own bias for learning as a leisure activity ….
The traditional argument for B over A (that is, make-work over basic income) used to be that idleness is a vice and industriousness a virtue; that it is better to work than to sit on your ass. This seems like a lost purpose, though — the reason that work is usually better than idleness is that work accomplishes something useful. Work without purpose features prominently in depictions of hell, from the myth of Sisyphus to The Far Side.
Moreover, political authority in the countries in which I worked was arbitrary, capricious, and corrupt. In Tanzania, for example, you could tell the representative of the sole and omnipotent political party, the Party of the Revolution, by his girth alone. Tanzanians were thin, but party men were fat. The party representative in my village sent a man to prison because the man’s wife refused to sleep with him. In Nigeria the police hired out their guns by night to the armed robbers.
Yet nothing I saw—neither the poverty nor the overt oppression—ever had the same devastating effect on the human personality as the undiscriminating welfare state. I never saw the loss of dignity, the self-centeredness, the spiritual and emotional vacuity, or the sheer ignorance of how to live, that I see daily in England. In a kind of pincer movement, therefore, I and the doctors from India and the Philippines have come to the same terrible conclusion: that the worst poverty is in England—and it is not material poverty but poverty of soul.
I don’t understand how one can say “The party representative in my village sent a man to prison because the man’s wife refused to sleep with him. In Nigeria the police hired out their guns by night to the armed robbers.”, and then one paragraph later say “I never saw the loss of dignity, the self-centeredness, the spiritual and emotional vacuity, or the sheer ignorance of how to live, that I see daily in England.”
It seems to me that giving a man a choice to give you his wife for sexual favors, or go to prison, involves a significant loss of dignity, and a significant amount of self-centeredness. What is causing this disconnect? Is it simply that such vacuity is more problematic when it’s exhibited by the lower classes, than when it’s exhibited by the ruling elite?
These are real costs, and they are certainly worth taking seriously; nevertheless, the crowds of emigrants trying to get from the Third World to the First, and the lack of any crowd in the opposite direction, suggest the benefits outweigh the costs.
Is it simply that such vacuity is more problematic when it’s exhibited by the lower classes, than when it’s exhibited by the ruling elite?
This is not as implausible as you might think. In the spirit of Yvain’s Versailles-building czar, imagine a king of lousy moral character who likes to go around randomly raping the wives of men. In fact, he does this every week, so in a single year there are 52 men who have had to suffer the indignity of having their wives so violated. Sounds horrible, right?
Now, Wikipedia tells me that the rape rate in the U.S. is around 27 per 100,000 per year. The United States has a population of 320,000,000 or so, which works out to around 86,000 rapes per year. If the aforementioned king came to power in the United States and enacted policy changes which reduced the rape rate by even 1%, he would have paid for himself 16 times over.
What does this tell us? That a society where vast swathes of the population suffer from social pathologies is probably going to be worse than one where a tiny fraction of elites occasionally indulge themselves in transgressions against the common man. I know that, in practice, the most powerful politicians and the richest of celebrities in the U.S. could probably make my life pretty damn miserable if they wanted to, maybe because I somehow pissed them off or because they have sadistic predilections they just randomly decided to satisfy at my expense, and yet, I am not nearly as afraid of them as I am of the members of the underclass I occasionally pass by on the street.
What does this tell us? That a society where vast swathes of the population suffer from social pathologies is probably going to be worse than one where a tiny fraction of elites occasionally indulge themselves in transgressions against the common man.
But that isn’t a society in which “political authority … was arbitrary, capricious, and corrupt”, or where “you could tell the representative of the sole and omnipotent political party, the Party of the Revolution, by his girth alone”, or where “the police hired out their guns by night to the armed robbers”—that is a society in which a vast majority of elites, not a tiny fraction, indulge themselves regularly in a wide range of transgressions against the common man. And that isn’t merely a society in which one in a million people have to suffer their wife being raped; it’s a society in which all but one in a million people have to suffer poverty and malnutrition, and arbitrary death due to poor conditions, poor safety regulation, and poor concern for welfare in general. I think that a slight risk of street crime from the underclasses pales in comparison to the kinds of organized depravations inflicted regularly on the populace in such places.
It jarred me too, but I don’t like to point out factor-of-two mistakes in arguments relying on orders-of-magnitude differences because this.
(Well, that may be problematic for different reasons too, but I was stunned speechless by the fact that a discussion mentioning rape had managed not to mindkill anybody thus far, and was afraid that calling that out could break the spell.)
It’s also a society in which an equivalent number have to suffer being raped.
I’m a little bit appalled to find a line of argument here that implies that only men are people!
The problem with letting yourself be distracted by that kind of phrasing, is that you spend so much time crusading for Right Thinking that you never get to make your actual point. Clever debaters will notice this, and will start deliberately trolling you just to see how many times they can derail you.
Also, declaring that only men are people is a statement of value, not a statement of fact. Oftentimes, when you find someone whose values you disagree with, it is more fruitful to take their value system as given and find discongruities WITHIN it, or discongruities between that value system and the behavior of the person espousing it, than it is to merely declare that you are appalled by that value system.
First, it might well be that fubarobfusco does not believe that your value system actually embeds the idea that only men are people, and therefore your suggestion about what is more fruitful to do when such a value conflict arises might not seem apposite to them. They might have instead been (as they said) objecting to the implications of the line of argument itself.
Second, do you mean to imply that fubarobfusco was actually allowing themselves to be derailed/distracted from something in this case? Or are you just expressing your concern that they might hypothetically be in some other, similar, case? (Or is this just an indirect way of suggesting that their comment was inappropriate for other reasons?)
EDIT: army1987 just explained better. Feel free to TL;DR the rest of this post and most of my previous one.
Hmm. English lacks distinction between specific and generic ‘you’. :(
I was trying to describe my own thought processes when I chose to continue the “suffer the indignity of having their wives raped” line, rather than challenge it in the typical gender-crusader fashion. (Also, I suspected that jaime2000 was stating that line hyperbolically in any case—Poe’s Law is tricky that way.)
While I agree with gender equality goals myself, displaying that I am appalled at someone else’s disregard for gender equality has an opportunity cost that I didn’t want to pay at the time, and wasn’t likely to achieve the results that one normally hopes for when performing that display. Lesswrong doesn’t seem to be the sort of place where shaming and rallying tactics work, nor do I want it to be. So I’ll try to treat people’s positions courteously as long as their positions don’t seem actively disingenuous.
When I saw fubarobfusco’s post, I read it as a shaming/rallying tactic for ‘my side’, which I felt a minor social obligation to respond to. Rather than falling into line, I decided to explain my dissent.
Also, I suspected that jaime2000 was stating that line hyperbolically in any case
Me too, but I was too lazy to try to guesstimate whether I was right (e.g. by looking at jaime2000′s contribution history) and so I didn’t even mention that.
That’s assuming a leader’s vices somehow correlate with enacting positive societal changes (when the contrary would seem more likely). Otherwise choosing instead one of the many, just as competent and not as corrupt potential leaders is still a superior choice.
The article was comparing societies where the population was horribly poor or subjected to tyrannical leaders but still had their drive, human dignity, and joie de vivre, with the nihilistic U.K. underclass who did not have such problems but who used their freedom to do little more than eat, sleep, fuck, fight, and dope, and deciding that the former was preferable. Obviously if you can have a functioning population without vicious leaders, that would be best, and the article made no claim that this was impossible or unlikely.
It’s true that one person committing personal crimes with impunity doesn’t have much measurable effect on crime rates in a society of any size, but that’s neither surprising nor particularly informative. No matter how shiny that person’s hat.
You’d be surprised how quickly even normally very rational people go to the “but… Versailles! Droit du seigneur!” emotive argument when someone suggests that there can be socioeconomic benefits to a high level of inequality.
The same scope insensitivity which makes people care more about a single sick puppy than millions of starving people makes it very difficult to see that the highly-visible opulence of the elite costs much less than the largely invisible ‘welfare’ superstructure which provides our underclass their bread and circuses. Not to mention that one produces value for society while the other annihilates it.
If a rationalist knows anything it should be how easy it is to forget to multiply or use inappropriately anchoring null hypotheses, especially when ideological sacred cows are involved.
Ideological mind-projection. The writer who hates the English welfare state has somewhat different values from all the Third World people who want to protect their female family members from rape and eat meat once in a while. The writer therefore believes that rather than wanting to be English poor people—with food banks, benefits, and council houses—the Third World people are much better off the way they are.
I think this depends on how you read “I never saw the X.” Consider something like “I never saw the death due to accident in England that I see in Tanzania.” If you view this as the claim that no one ever dies in accidents in England, then obviously this is wrong. If you view this as the claim that death due to accident is qualitatively different in England and Tanzania, and worse in Tanzania, then it seems sensible.
We’re likely to end up in a society where human labor is unnecessary one way or another, simply because of the advance of automation and ultimately AI. We do not have the choice of preserving the “work paradigm” indefinitely — that is, unless we end up in a Bad Ending where the future of humanity is vastly warped or curtailed.
So, if humans need work, we are doomed; because productive labor aims to extinguish itself. Moreover, the extinction of labor is already in progress.
My question is: How shall the extinction of labor be distributed? I see no reason to declare that the people who currently own the robots should get to be the ones to move into a post-labor civilization, and everyone else can go to hell.
We’re likely to end up in a society where human labor is unnecessary one way or another, simply because of the advance of automation and ultimately AI. We do not have the choice of preserving the “work paradigm” indefinitely — that is, unless we end up in a Bad Ending where the future of humanity is vastly warped or curtailed.
I sometimes think that futuristic ideals phrased in terms of “getting rid of work” would be better reformulated as “removing low-quality work to make way for high-quality work”.
(But the difference might be more about where you draw the line on the map between what you call “work” and what you call “play” than about where you think people in the territory should do in the future.)
My question is: How shall the extinction of labor be distributed? I see no reason to declare that the people who currently own the robots should get to be the ones to move into a post-labor civilization, and everyone else can go to hell.
Very relevant … and there’s a few particularly amusing points in there, including in the comments. For instance — If a lifestyle without work reliably breaks people, then why aren’t retirees/pensioners reliably broken?
OTOH ISTR that lottery winner are pretty often broken. So I guess a lifestyle without work breaks certain people but not others, and whether it does depends not only on individual personality variance but also on circumstances, in some non-totally-obvious-a-priori way.
We’re likely to end up in a society where human labor is unnecessary one way or another, simply because of the advance of automation and ultimately AI. We do not have the choice of preserving the “work paradigm” indefinitely — that is, unless we end up in a Bad Ending where the future of humanity is vastly warped or curtailed.
I lack the information necessary to evaluate what is likely, but barring very specific definitions of the word “unnecessary” I don’t think it’s obvious that it’s impossible without massively curtailing the future of humanity. If the importance of the work paradigm exists and is fundamental to parts of human nature we like(1), there are a number of imaginable ways for those to be made necessary even if it could be made unnecessary. While some of these possible futures are dysutopian (Brave New World), not all of them need be.
(1) I’m not sure this is the case. Some sort of act-or-unpleasant-things-happen seems necessary to get a good future, but this may or may not circumscribe the work paradigm.
Which just elucidates that the point of the exercise should be to provide humans with the abundant wealth generated by technological advancement — not to sort humans into deserving ones and undeserving ones, then send the undeserving ones to hell.
I understand the desire to make sure people aren’t suffering, but can’t we think about the suffering of future generations as well?
Paying for people to do nothing incentives doing nothing; fewer people will participate the more comfortable laying around gets compared to actual work. Worse, removing the natural selective pressures against low-IQ / high time-preference people means they will reproduce and leave the next generation with even more unproductive people for every productive person remaining to have to support. With IQ now negatively correlated with fertility, that’s a recipe for genetic disaster and societal collapse.
Buying the happiness of our generation’s underclass at the expense of who knows how many of their descendants when the system finally collapses under it’s own weight is the opposite of compassion; it’s just pushing the suffering far enough into the future that you hope you can’t see it anymore. If we really cared about making people comfortable, why shouldn’t we look for a solution where we promote the traits which lead people to build their own happiness in the long run?
I thought my other comment was way too terse, and was going to elaborate, but it looks like two people disagree. But anyway: my point is that there are ways to help people now which don’t also help them reproduce; education would be the most obvious one. (“Removing the natural selective pressures against low-IQ / high time-preference people” is not what has lead to the observed negative correlation between IQ and fertility; it’s not that stupid people have more children than they used to, it’s that smart people have fewer.)
I would be most happy to see the option “A+” = “John is paid to do nothing; and then John uses his free time to do something useful but unpaid for his community”. Because there are so many things that need to be done.
Once I saw an example on a TV: there was a village that had two big problems: a) many unemployed people, and b) no kindergarten. The local government solved this problem by paying a few local women to take care of the local children kindergarten-style at their (the women’s) homes. And I was like: “OMG, that’s the most logical solution; so obvious in hindsight! Why doesn’t this kind of stuff happen more often?” (The women were first given some quick education about various activities they should do with the children, and they had a coordinator. So the solution had a support from outside; it just relied on the work of local people.)
But to make this happen more often, there are some problems, both on the side of the local governments and on the side of the people. Every kind of work needs to be organized somehow, and organizing the work is also work, and rather difficult one; not everyone can do it well. There must be someone who does it well, and that person needs to be paid. On the other side, I can imagine that many people would try to cheat the system by pretending to do something useful for the community, but really optimizing for their own maximum convenience at the expense of everything else.
I can imagine a local non-profit organization, literally paying people for doing useful stuff, or just paying them for doing nothing when nothing needs to be done. However, when there is a work to do for the community, and a person refuses to do it or is obviously cheating, that person would be removed from the list. I can also imagine this solution would have a lot of problems, getting the money being one of them but not the only one.
I would actually say it’s definitely better, if you’re stuck subsidizing someone’s survival, to subsidize them as a “freeloader”, aka: someone with actual leisure.
If you’re thinking that this is an incentive against the work-ethic, yes, it is. I believe our culture currently overemphasizes work-ethic, and this is all part of my sneaky evil plan to convince people to value work less.
You do realize the only reason society functions well enough to support the large welfare states you seem to like is because enough people still have vestiges of a work ethic?
You realize there exists a happy medium between 100-hour workweeks and zero-hour workweeks? “Vestiges of a work-ethic”? Actual, factual working hours have gotten longer among all full-time employees in most countries over the past several decades, and especially (almost everywhere) the past decade or so (even before the Great Recession, which would have a normal cyclical effect of lengthening work hours in a time of high unemployment).
And no, I don’t prefer a “large welfare state”. Please actually engage me in conversation rather than simply burning a strawman of “The dirty liberal”.
Interestingly, the data for Europe over the past decade actually refutes my hypothesis. As a secondary hypothesis that better fits that and other international data: hours and wages across countries appear to be equalizing as globalization occurs (again, this isn’t actually the first time). The richer countries have seen a rise in their full-time working hours, while the poorer countries have seen a reduction. It remains to be seen whether a longer timespan of data would support either of these hypotheses.
However, the effect of partition from a largely full-time economy into an economy divided between statistically distinct classes of full-time and part-time workers (the so-called “precariat”) does seem to be occurring.
the effect of partition from a largely full-time economy into an economy divided between statistically distinct classes of full-time and part-time workers (the so-called “precariat”) does seem to be occurring.
There are multiple factors in play here, but my impression is that mostly (but not entirely) this is a good thing.
Essentially people who have a valid (from the point of view of their finances, lifestyle, etc.) choice between working full-time and part-time are exercising their choice. It works from both ends—to take stereotypical examples, a contract programmer might reduce his workload to part-time because he earns enough money and values leisure more; and a stay-at-home mom might pick up a part-time job because she has enough time and energy for it, but not for a full-time job. This is good—it represents the availability of choice.
Anecdotally, I can attest that in the overemployed professions, some employers have started offering part-time hours at high hourly rates (or contracting/consulting jobs working part-year-round) as a fringe benefit to attract elite, high-skilled workers. Your contract worker is an example: I’ve done that one, earning a perfectly respectable monthly salary as a contract programmer but only working a few months at a time to get a frugal income quickly.
However, we do know that outside the conventionally-overemployed, high-hourly-rate professions, stay-at-home parenting has declined and part-timing has risen without necessarily being by choice.
I would venture to say that we should look for some numbers on hourly earnings (potentially split into full-time and part-time workers) to see what’s really going on. That sounds at least intuitively right, as I’ve known more than a few “highly-paid” scientists, programmers, lawyers, etc who end up with fairly moderate or even low hourly earnings once you account for their immense working hours.
That graph simply counts all workers, not all full-time workers. The effect I’m describing is not a unitary rise in overall hours but a partitioning of the economy into overemployed (rise in full-time hours) and underemployed (rise in part-time jobs). This matters, because a “total decline” in working hours that matches this model will be felt by the full-time worker as a heavy overtime load and by the part-time worker as a shortage of wages/hours.
Could it be related to the fact that the society becomes more complex and many jobs require more skill? That could explain why you have one overburdened worker and one unemployed person, and you still cannot give half of the former’s work to the latter.
As an obvious example, a company I work for is looking for more Java programmers. They even pay decently. There is a 14% unemployment in my country, but that’s not useful to my company, because those hundreds of thousands of people without jobs are not really good at Java or any other programming. In other areas the difference is less extreme, but it may still exist.
Could it be related to the fact that the society becomes more complex and many jobs require more skill?
A “skill-demand gap” is a very viable hypothesis. However, we should look for stiffly predictive variables. There are at least some claims that capital-biased public policy has created this situation rather than just the increase in the economy’s complexity.
Keep in mind, I’m not declaring a confidence in that position, but I can certainly call it a plausible claim that tax policies favoring finance capital, employer-tilted labor policies, and a trade policy of running huge deficits could hurt the employment market generally, or specifically lead to a situation in which the employment market bisects into a high-value highly-mechanized elite and a low-value mass of less-skilled laborers.
The one thing I am highly confident in is that the level of perceived skill or expertise needed to belong to the well-paid/overburdened “skilled elite” has risen.
You linked to a Reddit discussion about the article, where currently the “best” rated comment is: “I totally don’t get the logic here.” :D
I didn’t read the original paper, but from the article it seems to me their main argument is that under the hypothesis of skill-demand gap we would see the decrease of high-paying jobs and increase of low-paying jobs (which happened) accompanied with rising wages of the low-paying jobs (which didn’t happen, and therefore the hypothesis is false).
Let’s imagine that someone loses their high-paying job because it became too complex. For example, tomorrow the whole IT business will switch from Java to Lisp, but I am unable to learn Lisp, so I lose my job. So I become a retail clerk. Why exactly should I expect a higher wage than other retails clerks? If the same thing happened to many people, I would actually expect retail clerk wages decreasing, because now there is a greater labor supply in the industry.
Similar objections were already stated in the Reddit discussion.
So I become a retail clerk. Why exactly should I expect a higher wage than other retails clerks? If the same thing happened to many people, I would actually expect retail clerk wages decreasing, because now there is a greater labor supply in the industry.
At least in the classical economic theory, the idea is that you and other displaced Java programmers are more skilled than the average retail worker before the switch to LISP, and at least part of those skills are transferrable. Probably not the Java programming, but at least the math, job awareness, and other various generalist skills that are part of higher-profile jobs.
((This falls apart in extremes because many job skills don’t transfer or are even counter-useful, and employers have reasons to avoid hiring high-investment workers who have other better job offers available.))
In terms of actually existing politics, which do you think people in general would dislike least: subsidizing would-be freeloaders with taxpayer money, or using that same taxpayer money to hire people (or subsidize hiring people) to do largely unproductive jobs that the market wouldn’t pay them a living wage to do? There seems to be a general feeling that it’s wrong to let people (figuratively) starve, but also that it’s bad to give people things they don’t deserve.
If the answer is “I think people in general would rather make people work for their money, even if the work itself isn’t actually worth what we’re paying” then we might as well let Wal-Mart do the hiring rather than have the government do it directly.
(Aside: The textbook example of unproductive make-work is digging ditches and filling them in again. A slightly less obviously ridiculous way to employ low-skilled workers is as “taxi drivers” for people who would rather spend their daily commute doing something other than driving but wouldn’t go to the expense of hiring a driver themselves. After all, driving is a skill that most adults actually do have...)
Imagine that you are designing a Prisonner’s Dilemma game. When all the numbers are ready, you have an additional option to increase the reward for defecting when the opponent cooperates. Would you do it?
If you expect that the player’s future decisions are already fixed and your numbers will not change them, then increasing the reward adds more value to some players, while removing value from none. Thus it would be good to increase the reward.
But if you expect that people look at the payoff matrix and choose accordingly, increasing the reward for defecting will lead to less cooperation. By increasing the reward for defecting, you are reducing cooperation… and it’s not obvious what will be the result.
Now let’s add another complication. Let’s assume that some players’ voting mechanisms are broken, so they always vote to defect, and are unable to change that. It feels moral to punish those who defect voluntarily, but it feels immoral to punish those who merely randomly received a broken voting mechanism. -- I am speaking about people who are too stupid to do the kind of work that is important in a modern society. As opposed to people who could do the work, but are too lazy, if the system allows them. Both of them are mixed in the category of unemployed, with no easy way to distinguish between them.
Unfortunately, trying to set the numbers so that no one chooses this option voluntarily, and yet those who don’t have an option of escaping it are treated well… seems like a contradiction.
(There is a sci-fi “Limes inferior” about a society where all people have to do public IQ tests, and those above some value are legally required to work, while those below the value are not. Everyone gets a basic income, the smart people get a bonus for being smart, and the working people get another bonus for work.)
I think I’m missing your point.
It seems that one approach to this is for me to treat everyone well whether they work or not, and for me to provide additional incentives to people for doing the kind of work I want people to perform. This admittedly does not have the structure of a Prisoners Dilemma game, but I’m not sure why the PD structure is important.
If I find that some people who are capable of doing that work consistently choose not to under my incentive structure, I can experiment with my incentive structure… different people are best motivated by different things, after all.
If despite that I still find that some people who are capable of doing that work consistently choose not to… well, that means less of the work I want people to perform will get done than if they chose otherwise. Which might be a huge problem, if that work is much more valuable than the stuff they choose to do.
I have a bunch of options at that point. E.g., I can figure out other ways to get that work done (e.g. automation). Or I can figure out ways to force people to do that work.
Or I can rethink my initial conditions and stop treating everyone well whether they work or not… I can instead treat people well if they do the work I want done, and poorly otherwise, and count on that differential treatment to provide the missing incentive.
But that last option is far from the only option, nor is it clear to me that it works better than the alternatives.
This seems to me almost what we have now. Yes, there is a problem about defining “treating well”. However well you treat one group of people, if you treat everyone else better, the former will complain. These days in first-world countries the unemployed people are treated much better than an average working person was centuries ago. But that’s irrelevant. We see that they are treated worse than other people are today, therefore they are not treated well.
Even if you start treating poor people much better than they are treated now, even better than the average people are now, just wait 10, at most 20 years, and they will start comparing you to Hitler, if they see that someone else is treated even better.
I agree that we should experiment more. Preferably many different experiments in smaller regions, so it is easier to stop things when they go horribly wrong. Seems to me a good first step would be giving more independence to regions; decentralizing the state power.
Expanding on my “yup” above a little… it’s certainly conceivable that we could adopt an approach to defining “treating well” that isn’t entirely relative.
For example, nation A could assert that A’s unemployed people are being treated well if they have better conditions than the unemployed in nation B (by which standard the U.S. unemployed are generally treated well). Or that A’s unemployed people are being treated well if their children don’t demonstrate significantly higher levels of deficiency-based illnesses (due to malnutrition, exposure, etc.) than the children of their employed people. Or various other standards.
The difficulty I’d expect to face when proposing such a standard isn’t that the unemployed under it would be worse off than the employed and therefore I’m Hitler, it’s that most people have already written their bottom line about whether (for example) the U.S. unemployed are generally treated well, and evaluate the standard based on whether it gives the right answer to that question.
Yes, we could. And then some people would get political karma for insisting that this isn’t the true definition of treating well, and instead is just a part of conspiracy for oppressing people.
I can imagine a situation where there are illnesses typically attributed to poverty (and some people get political karma for insisting on the poverty hypothesis), even if material poverty is not the cause. For example, you could give people tons of money to buy healthy food, and yet they could decide to spend it all on junk food and alcohol. You measure their childrens’ health, and it becomes obvious the children are not fed properly. This article describes it better than I could.
I agree that it would be great to have an absolute definition of “treating people well”, which could be reached, first in one country, and then perhaps globally. But I predict that the closer we would get to it, the more people would insist that it’s a wrong definition.
I think that in a long term it’s even worse: the bottom line depends on information the people get. In a totalitarian state, you just have to insist that everything is great, and imprison everyone who says otherwise, and after a few years people will believe that it really is great. But if you have freedom of speech, someone will always make political karma by insisting that people should have more (who wouldn’t like that?), and that not having more is completely unbearable.
I am not convinced your article shows an example of “poverty” not being caused by real poverty.
The examples in the article tend to include both poverty-related factors and non-poverty-related factors. For instance, certainly failing to press charges against an abusive, criminal, boyfriend is something that can be done by someone of any income level, but on the other hand, poor people are more likely to steal money (like this boyfriend did), more likely to be unable to treat mental illness that might result in violence, and more likely to be frustrated in ways that lead to violence. In this case the guy was a burglar and had no job (poverty leads to no money and people with no money and no job are more likely to burgle). Those aren’t 100% due to poverty (clearly frustration at poverty is only a contributing factor to violence and the person won’t be violent unless something else predisposes him to violence), but poverty affects them at the margins. Not to mention that even though each individual decision to stay with a boyfriend who has no job is technically not poverty-related, poverty cumulatively leads to a high rate of joblessness.
Poor people are also less likely to be educated and therefore more likely to make poor life decisions.
Even buying junk food is related to poverty because junk food has a lower time expenditure than other food and time has a greater relative cost to poor people than to rich people—poor people often work long hours that leave them exhausted, must spend a lot of personal time on child care, etc. Poor people also are less likely to have a supermarket with cheap non-junk food within easy commute distance. Again, none of this is 100% caused by poverty—this just raises the relative cost of non-junk food, it doesn’t make it completely non-affordable—but it certainly has an effect.
Well, it’s complicated. For poor people, some “smart” options are not really possible. On the other hand, I also see many relatively rich people making the stupid options voluntarily. Poverty can cause “stupid” (from our point of view) choices, and also stupid choices can cause poverty.
I would like to see a society where no one is forced to make the “stupid” choice. (Organizations helping poor people to press charges against criminals, providing them food and refrigerators, etc.) But even in such society I expect many people making the stupid choices voluntarily. (And then complain about an unfair society. So if we could get halfway to such society, judging from people’s reactions it would seem there was no improvement.)
A while back, a friend of mine informed me that poorer Americans consume junk food because it’s one of the few pleasures aside from alcohol that’s easily and cheaply available to people of that socioeconomic stratum, and that what she referred to as “food politics” is therefore symptomatic of privilege.
It sounded like rationalization to me at the time, and I still find the availability and time constraint arguments more convincing, but she’d have had more personal experience than I.
Recommended reading: “Why I Make Terrible Decisions, or, poverty thoughts”
There seems to be some evidence that the article is at least describing a general case, and not the author’s immediate experiences, or worse
Huh.
*updating*
Great article! In this specific case, replacing a state-subsidized work (if the author has one of those) with state-subsidized free time would be an obvious improvement. At least replacing one of these two jobs.
I am a bit confused because my first idea of a poor person is a person who can’t find a job, not a person who has two jobs (and therefore has no time to optimize their lives using the typical middle-class methods). I wonder how much should I update, and how much of this is a cultural difference. Or different kinds of poverty. Perhaps “having two jobs” is just a little bit higher economical level than “not having a job” (which explains why people keep doing it, instead of giving up). But maybe it’s something completely different than I am not aware of.
Reading the article again, I don’t quite understand why a person with two jobs complaining about a lack of time is also attending a school. Okay, it would make sense if the school is necessary for getting a better job in the future. But even then this is probably not a situation of a typical poor person.
EDIT: Everyone who was influenced by this article, please update! It is actually a hoax.
At least in the United States, less than 4% of households report under 5,000 USD in taxable income, while between 14% and 20% of households are defined as under the poverty line (depending on source). The official BLS numbers put it at 10.4 million people who are ‘working poor’, aka working or looking-for-work for half the year and also under the poverty line (pdf warning), and a little over three quarters of households under the poverty line have at least one person who fits into the “working poor” category. This is further complicated by income disparities and cost of living varying heavily from state-to-state: one can live much more comfortably on 20k in the midwest than on 40k in California.
A little over half of off-campus college students live under the poverty line, making up a significant part of total poverty . There’s a perception that a degree (and usually a four-year-degree) is necessary for any desirable “real” (non-retail non-fast food) job. Worse, there’s a perception that any degree is both necessary and sufficient for long-term “real” jobs. So you do get a lot of people trying to take classes and make ends meet at the same time, even if the system eventually shoves them out the door with a lot of student loans and a liberal arts degree that barely improves their options (or not even that: low-income folk who drop out get screwed even worse).
It’s probably not the average case, but it does make up a non-trivial portion of the total.
((On the other hand, many of the issues raised in the linked blog post show problems related to information access. “Sliding scale” payments usually mean nearly free for a low-income mother, in the odd case where she doesn’t qualify for Medicaid. The documentation necessary to set up even a post-9/11 bank account is less than that necessary to get most forms of public assistance including WIC or TANF, while there are other complex reasons people in poverty avoid bank accounts. It’s quite possible to cook basic staples with nothing more than a microwave, a plate, and a couple pieces of silverware, but that’s not really something that’s taught in Home Ec or cookbooks. And the depression self-diagnosis is… not robust.))
another emerging issue is that degrees can have a negative utility these days. if your degree can’t land you a “real” job, and employers who would otherwise take you now see you as ‘overqualified’, your options are more limited than if you never went to college in the first place.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time volunteering in fairly poor communities, and i my experience, many of the people living in those areas work multiple part-time jobs, some “official” some under-the-table.
In the US at least, statistics bare this out- even 45% of homeless people have worked a job in the last week (much fewer have regular jobs, because of the nature of homelessness). 13% have regular jobs (are working poor). ~25% or so of people below the poverty line are working poor, and the fraction has been increasing. I imagine if you include under-the-table jobs, its much higher.
My idea of a poor person is not someone without a job, but someone without money. Not having a job is one contributing factor to being poor, not part of the definition.
If you want to help poor people, and the only information you have is that they literally are without money, the only conclusion you can get from this data is that if you give them some money, you will make them less poor… well, at least in the short term.
Having information about how specifically these people are and remain poor shows opportunities for other interventions, some of which might be more effective. Thus I would like to know the most frequent “templates” for poverty.
The linked article describes a person who studies and works at two jobs, and lives in an area far away from many useful or cheap things. This can give some specific ideas about helping them. For example giving them enough money to keep only one job; or providing them a free ride to the nearest city. Some of these ideas may be more effective than others; for example if there are more people in the same area with the same problem, you could drive them to the city together by bus, instead of each of them in a separate car. Or a big refrigerator shared among multiple families. Or an advice about how to solve unusual situations that happen once in a while and they have no time to research.
Then there are people who are poor because they don’t have a job, and don’t even have the education necessary for the job. In that case, completely different specific ideas may be helpful; for example providing them the education or a simple work experience they could mention at a job interview. Or educating their children for free if they fail to understand something at school. Or perhaps teaching them how to do something useful for themselves and their neighbors, if free time is not a constraint. There are possible projects where they provide the work, and you pay for the materials and tools they need. Etc.
I always imagined the latter to be a typical example, and didn’t think much about the former. Now that I think about it, all the information I have on the former are from USA, while I have a lot of information on the latter from my country, so maybe it’s something country-specific. But maybe it’s just my limited information.
EDIT: The original article which inspired these thoughts was a hoax, so whatever conclusions were built on the provided information are extremely unreliable.
See also
Yup.
I’m all in favor of experimentation.
And if we’re already experimenting to the limits of our existing regional independence, such that increased independence will relax the rate-limiting constraint on experimentation (which I doubt we are, but is I suppose possible), then yes, increased regional independence would make sense as a next step. Though perhaps it’s best to do so in a small region, so it’s easier to stop things if it goes horribly wrong.
Of course, if we believe for other reasons that decentralizing state power is a good idea, then we should endorse doing so for other reasons, but that’s something of a nonsequitor.
/me shrugs
Disability screening in the real world isn’t perfect, but it works at least tolerably well. (“Tolerably”, in this case, means that nobody appears to be making a political issue out of it not working.)
It is an issue in the UK—the conservative government made a big issue about it, because it turned out that (off the top of my head) 75% of those on disability benefits were actually fit for either full or part-time work.
I stand corrected, then.
“Actually”? The UK government required disability benefit claimants to be re-assessed by ATOS, who rejected many claims. However that is a set of figures, not a reality: 38% of the rejected claimants were able to get their benefits re-instated on appeal, suggesting that ATOS had been given a mandate to drive figures down, rather than assess accurately.
Well the number of disabled people seems to increase whenever the economy goes down or disability benefits increase.
Of course, think of the horrible optics of trying to make a political issue out of it.
I used to have rock-paper-scissor preferences for that kind of thing (if A = “John is paid to do nothing, i.e. basic income guarantee”, B = “John is paid to do something useless, e.g. digging ditches and filling them again”, and C = “John is not paid at all”, I preferred B to A to C to B). I realized that and forced myself to resolve this when reading this post and its comment thread.
The traditional argument for B over A (that is, make-work over basic income) used to be that idleness is a vice and industriousness a virtue; that it is better to work than to sit on your ass. This seems like a lost purpose, though — the reason that work is usually better than idleness is that work accomplishes something useful. Work without purpose features prominently in depictions of hell, from the myth of Sisyphus to The Far Side.
A fourth alternative, D, might be “John is paid to take classes and learn skills.” John enrolls in art school and learns to make decorative pottery; or goes to math school and learns category theory; or goes to woodsman school and learns to build log cabins and tan squirrel hides; or goes to media-critic school and learns to write essays about reality television; or something else. Sure, there may not be a lot of demand for potters and squirrel leather, but that’s okay since the robots provide pretty much everything there is demand for.
However, I realize that in proposing D, I’m probably exposing my own bias for learning as a leisure activity ….
It’s not that simple. There are people who just don’t function without having to work for a living; give them lots of freedom and they simply use it to destroy themselves and others. Maybe they are consumed by superstimuli like World of Warcraft, or maybe they are the marginal case that is barely behaving in a civilized fashion because of the strong incentives associated with the work paradigm. You are probably thinking about the how the kinds of people who post on LessWrong would all have their lives improved with little to no downsides by such a scheme, but that’s the typical mind fallacy at work.
Many people also consider being “productive” or “making a difference” to be important parts of their identity, and while inefficient make-work could plausibly look enough like real work to trigger this instinct, free monthly paychecks can’t.
From that link:
I don’t understand how one can say “The party representative in my village sent a man to prison because the man’s wife refused to sleep with him. In Nigeria the police hired out their guns by night to the armed robbers.”, and then one paragraph later say “I never saw the loss of dignity, the self-centeredness, the spiritual and emotional vacuity, or the sheer ignorance of how to live, that I see daily in England.”
It seems to me that giving a man a choice to give you his wife for sexual favors, or go to prison, involves a significant loss of dignity, and a significant amount of self-centeredness. What is causing this disconnect? Is it simply that such vacuity is more problematic when it’s exhibited by the lower classes, than when it’s exhibited by the ruling elite?
Yvain mentioned that here:
This is not as implausible as you might think. In the spirit of Yvain’s Versailles-building czar, imagine a king of lousy moral character who likes to go around randomly raping the wives of men. In fact, he does this every week, so in a single year there are 52 men who have had to suffer the indignity of having their wives so violated. Sounds horrible, right?
Now, Wikipedia tells me that the rape rate in the U.S. is around 27 per 100,000 per year. The United States has a population of 320,000,000 or so, which works out to around 86,000 rapes per year. If the aforementioned king came to power in the United States and enacted policy changes which reduced the rape rate by even 1%, he would have paid for himself 16 times over.
What does this tell us? That a society where vast swathes of the population suffer from social pathologies is probably going to be worse than one where a tiny fraction of elites occasionally indulge themselves in transgressions against the common man. I know that, in practice, the most powerful politicians and the richest of celebrities in the U.S. could probably make my life pretty damn miserable if they wanted to, maybe because I somehow pissed them off or because they have sadistic predilections they just randomly decided to satisfy at my expense, and yet, I am not nearly as afraid of them as I am of the members of the underclass I occasionally pass by on the street.
But that isn’t a society in which “political authority … was arbitrary, capricious, and corrupt”, or where “you could tell the representative of the sole and omnipotent political party, the Party of the Revolution, by his girth alone”, or where “the police hired out their guns by night to the armed robbers”—that is a society in which a vast majority of elites, not a tiny fraction, indulge themselves regularly in a wide range of transgressions against the common man. And that isn’t merely a society in which one in a million people have to suffer their wife being raped; it’s a society in which all but one in a million people have to suffer poverty and malnutrition, and arbitrary death due to poor conditions, poor safety regulation, and poor concern for welfare in general. I think that a slight risk of street crime from the underclasses pales in comparison to the kinds of organized depravations inflicted regularly on the populace in such places.
If we’re still talking consequentially, that is.
It’s also a society in which an equivalent number have to suffer being raped.
I’m a little bit appalled to find a line of argument here that implies that only men are people!
It jarred me too, but I don’t like to point out factor-of-two mistakes in arguments relying on orders-of-magnitude differences because this.
(Well, that may be problematic for different reasons too, but I was stunned speechless by the fact that a discussion mentioning rape had managed not to mindkill anybody thus far, and was afraid that calling that out could break the spell.)
Scratch everything I just said, army1987 just summed up my position far more succinctly than I did.
EDIT: Really?
The problem with letting yourself be distracted by that kind of phrasing, is that you spend so much time crusading for Right Thinking that you never get to make your actual point. Clever debaters will notice this, and will start deliberately trolling you just to see how many times they can derail you.
Also, declaring that only men are people is a statement of value, not a statement of fact. Oftentimes, when you find someone whose values you disagree with, it is more fruitful to take their value system as given and find discongruities WITHIN it, or discongruities between that value system and the behavior of the person espousing it, than it is to merely declare that you are appalled by that value system.
Couple of things.
First, it might well be that fubarobfusco does not believe that your value system actually embeds the idea that only men are people, and therefore your suggestion about what is more fruitful to do when such a value conflict arises might not seem apposite to them. They might have instead been (as they said) objecting to the implications of the line of argument itself.
Second, do you mean to imply that fubarobfusco was actually allowing themselves to be derailed/distracted from something in this case? Or are you just expressing your concern that they might hypothetically be in some other, similar, case? (Or is this just an indirect way of suggesting that their comment was inappropriate for other reasons?)
EDIT: army1987 just explained better. Feel free to TL;DR the rest of this post and most of my previous one.
Hmm. English lacks distinction between specific and generic ‘you’. :(
I was trying to describe my own thought processes when I chose to continue the “suffer the indignity of having their wives raped” line, rather than challenge it in the typical gender-crusader fashion. (Also, I suspected that jaime2000 was stating that line hyperbolically in any case—Poe’s Law is tricky that way.)
While I agree with gender equality goals myself, displaying that I am appalled at someone else’s disregard for gender equality has an opportunity cost that I didn’t want to pay at the time, and wasn’t likely to achieve the results that one normally hopes for when performing that display. Lesswrong doesn’t seem to be the sort of place where shaming and rallying tactics work, nor do I want it to be. So I’ll try to treat people’s positions courteously as long as their positions don’t seem actively disingenuous.
When I saw fubarobfusco’s post, I read it as a shaming/rallying tactic for ‘my side’, which I felt a minor social obligation to respond to. Rather than falling into line, I decided to explain my dissent.
You can use “one” for the latter.
Ah, I see. Thanks for the explanation.
Me too, but I was too lazy to try to guesstimate whether I was right (e.g. by looking at jaime2000′s contribution history) and so I didn’t even mention that.
That’s assuming a leader’s vices somehow correlate with enacting positive societal changes (when the contrary would seem more likely). Otherwise choosing instead one of the many, just as competent and not as corrupt potential leaders is still a superior choice.
The article was comparing societies where the population was horribly poor or subjected to tyrannical leaders but still had their drive, human dignity, and joie de vivre, with the nihilistic U.K. underclass who did not have such problems but who used their freedom to do little more than eat, sleep, fuck, fight, and dope, and deciding that the former was preferable. Obviously if you can have a functioning population without vicious leaders, that would be best, and the article made no claim that this was impossible or unlikely.
It’s true that one person committing personal crimes with impunity doesn’t have much measurable effect on crime rates in a society of any size, but that’s neither surprising nor particularly informative. No matter how shiny that person’s hat.
You’d be surprised how quickly even normally very rational people go to the “but… Versailles! Droit du seigneur!” emotive argument when someone suggests that there can be socioeconomic benefits to a high level of inequality.
The same scope insensitivity which makes people care more about a single sick puppy than millions of starving people makes it very difficult to see that the highly-visible opulence of the elite costs much less than the largely invisible ‘welfare’ superstructure which provides our underclass their bread and circuses. Not to mention that one produces value for society while the other annihilates it.
If a rationalist knows anything it should be how easy it is to forget to multiply or use inappropriately anchoring null hypotheses, especially when ideological sacred cows are involved.
Ideological mind-projection. The writer who hates the English welfare state has somewhat different values from all the Third World people who want to protect their female family members from rape and eat meat once in a while. The writer therefore believes that rather than wanting to be English poor people—with food banks, benefits, and council houses—the Third World people are much better off the way they are.
I think this depends on how you read “I never saw the X.” Consider something like “I never saw the death due to accident in England that I see in Tanzania.” If you view this as the claim that no one ever dies in accidents in England, then obviously this is wrong. If you view this as the claim that death due to accident is qualitatively different in England and Tanzania, and worse in Tanzania, then it seems sensible.
We’re likely to end up in a society where human labor is unnecessary one way or another, simply because of the advance of automation and ultimately AI. We do not have the choice of preserving the “work paradigm” indefinitely — that is, unless we end up in a Bad Ending where the future of humanity is vastly warped or curtailed.
So, if humans need work, we are doomed; because productive labor aims to extinguish itself. Moreover, the extinction of labor is already in progress.
My question is: How shall the extinction of labor be distributed? I see no reason to declare that the people who currently own the robots should get to be the ones to move into a post-labor civilization, and everyone else can go to hell.
Well, EY says
(But the difference might be more about where you draw the line on the map between what you call “work” and what you call “play” than about where you think people in the territory should do in the future.)
See here (and followup here).
Very relevant … and there’s a few particularly amusing points in there, including in the comments. For instance — If a lifestyle without work reliably breaks people, then why aren’t retirees/pensioners reliably broken?
OTOH ISTR that lottery winner are pretty often broken. So I guess a lifestyle without work breaks certain people but not others, and whether it does depends not only on individual personality variance but also on circumstances, in some non-totally-obvious-a-priori way.
I award myself five points for guessing that quote was from Dalrymple.
I lack the information necessary to evaluate what is likely, but barring very specific definitions of the word “unnecessary” I don’t think it’s obvious that it’s impossible without massively curtailing the future of humanity. If the importance of the work paradigm exists and is fundamental to parts of human nature we like(1), there are a number of imaginable ways for those to be made necessary even if it could be made unnecessary. While some of these possible futures are dysutopian (Brave New World), not all of them need be.
(1) I’m not sure this is the case. Some sort of act-or-unpleasant-things-happen seems necessary to get a good future, but this may or may not circumscribe the work paradigm.
John sits resentfully in a class with a disinterested teacher, both fully aware they are wasting their time...
You could solve this by making the free money conditional on passing exams, but that would be unfair on those who failed.
Which just elucidates that the point of the exercise should be to provide humans with the abundant wealth generated by technological advancement — not to sort humans into deserving ones and undeserving ones, then send the undeserving ones to hell.
I understand the desire to make sure people aren’t suffering, but can’t we think about the suffering of future generations as well?
Paying for people to do nothing incentives doing nothing; fewer people will participate the more comfortable laying around gets compared to actual work. Worse, removing the natural selective pressures against low-IQ / high time-preference people means they will reproduce and leave the next generation with even more unproductive people for every productive person remaining to have to support. With IQ now negatively correlated with fertility, that’s a recipe for genetic disaster and societal collapse.
Buying the happiness of our generation’s underclass at the expense of who knows how many of their descendants when the system finally collapses under it’s own weight is the opposite of compassion; it’s just pushing the suffering far enough into the future that you hope you can’t see it anymore. If we really cared about making people comfortable, why shouldn’t we look for a solution where we promote the traits which lead people to build their own happiness in the long run?
I thought my other comment was way too terse, and was going to elaborate, but it looks like two people disagree. But anyway: my point is that there are ways to help people now which don’t also help them reproduce; education would be the most obvious one. (“Removing the natural selective pressures against low-IQ / high time-preference people” is not what has lead to the observed negative correlation between IQ and fertility; it’s not that stupid people have more children than they used to, it’s that smart people have fewer.)
Subsidize the hell out of IUDs, or something like that.
You mean paying people for implanting IUDs, and covering the costs involved? That could work, I suppose.
Yes, the subsidies may be so large that the cost to the end users becomes negative.
Upvoted for uncovering a psychologically plausible, real-life example of cyclic preferences.
I would be most happy to see the option “A+” = “John is paid to do nothing; and then John uses his free time to do something useful but unpaid for his community”. Because there are so many things that need to be done.
Once I saw an example on a TV: there was a village that had two big problems: a) many unemployed people, and b) no kindergarten. The local government solved this problem by paying a few local women to take care of the local children kindergarten-style at their (the women’s) homes. And I was like: “OMG, that’s the most logical solution; so obvious in hindsight! Why doesn’t this kind of stuff happen more often?” (The women were first given some quick education about various activities they should do with the children, and they had a coordinator. So the solution had a support from outside; it just relied on the work of local people.)
But to make this happen more often, there are some problems, both on the side of the local governments and on the side of the people. Every kind of work needs to be organized somehow, and organizing the work is also work, and rather difficult one; not everyone can do it well. There must be someone who does it well, and that person needs to be paid. On the other side, I can imagine that many people would try to cheat the system by pretending to do something useful for the community, but really optimizing for their own maximum convenience at the expense of everything else.
I can imagine a local non-profit organization, literally paying people for doing useful stuff, or just paying them for doing nothing when nothing needs to be done. However, when there is a work to do for the community, and a person refuses to do it or is obviously cheating, that person would be removed from the list. I can also imagine this solution would have a lot of problems, getting the money being one of them but not the only one.
I would actually say it’s definitely better, if you’re stuck subsidizing someone’s survival, to subsidize them as a “freeloader”, aka: someone with actual leisure.
If you’re thinking that this is an incentive against the work-ethic, yes, it is. I believe our culture currently overemphasizes work-ethic, and this is all part of my sneaky evil plan to convince people to value work less.
That’s one data point. What’s your guess as to what people that aren’t you think about this?
I wouldn’t venture to guess at other people’s thoughts. I’d rather just ask them.
I strongly agree. Just to be another data point :)
You do realize the only reason society functions well enough to support the large welfare states you seem to like is because enough people still have vestiges of a work ethic?
You realize there exists a happy medium between 100-hour workweeks and zero-hour workweeks? “Vestiges of a work-ethic”? Actual, factual working hours have gotten longer among all full-time employees in most countries over the past several decades, and especially (almost everywhere) the past decade or so (even before the Great Recession, which would have a normal cyclical effect of lengthening work hours in a time of high unemployment).
And no, I don’t prefer a “large welfare state”. Please actually engage me in conversation rather than simply burning a strawman of “The dirty liberal”.
Dear Lord, man.
That does not appear to be true. See e.g. this.
Interestingly, the data for Europe over the past decade actually refutes my hypothesis. As a secondary hypothesis that better fits that and other international data: hours and wages across countries appear to be equalizing as globalization occurs (again, this isn’t actually the first time). The richer countries have seen a rise in their full-time working hours, while the poorer countries have seen a reduction. It remains to be seen whether a longer timespan of data would support either of these hypotheses.
However, the effect of partition from a largely full-time economy into an economy divided between statistically distinct classes of full-time and part-time workers (the so-called “precariat”) does seem to be occurring.
My apologies.
There are multiple factors in play here, but my impression is that mostly (but not entirely) this is a good thing.
Essentially people who have a valid (from the point of view of their finances, lifestyle, etc.) choice between working full-time and part-time are exercising their choice. It works from both ends—to take stereotypical examples, a contract programmer might reduce his workload to part-time because he earns enough money and values leisure more; and a stay-at-home mom might pick up a part-time job because she has enough time and energy for it, but not for a full-time job. This is good—it represents the availability of choice.
This is a very complicated issue to unravel.
Anecdotally, I can attest that in the overemployed professions, some employers have started offering part-time hours at high hourly rates (or contracting/consulting jobs working part-year-round) as a fringe benefit to attract elite, high-skilled workers. Your contract worker is an example: I’ve done that one, earning a perfectly respectable monthly salary as a contract programmer but only working a few months at a time to get a frugal income quickly.
However, we do know that outside the conventionally-overemployed, high-hourly-rate professions, stay-at-home parenting has declined and part-timing has risen without necessarily being by choice.
I would venture to say that we should look for some numbers on hourly earnings (potentially split into full-time and part-time workers) to see what’s really going on. That sounds at least intuitively right, as I’ve known more than a few “highly-paid” scientists, programmers, lawyers, etc who end up with fairly moderate or even low hourly earnings once you account for their immense working hours.
That graph simply counts all workers, not all full-time workers. The effect I’m describing is not a unitary rise in overall hours but a partitioning of the economy into overemployed (rise in full-time hours) and underemployed (rise in part-time jobs). This matters, because a “total decline” in working hours that matches this model will be felt by the full-time worker as a heavy overtime load and by the part-time worker as a shortage of wages/hours.
Could it be related to the fact that the society becomes more complex and many jobs require more skill? That could explain why you have one overburdened worker and one unemployed person, and you still cannot give half of the former’s work to the latter.
As an obvious example, a company I work for is looking for more Java programmers. They even pay decently. There is a 14% unemployment in my country, but that’s not useful to my company, because those hundreds of thousands of people without jobs are not really good at Java or any other programming. In other areas the difference is less extreme, but it may still exist.
A “skill-demand gap” is a very viable hypothesis. However, we should look for stiffly predictive variables. There are at least some claims that capital-biased public policy has created this situation rather than just the increase in the economy’s complexity.
Keep in mind, I’m not declaring a confidence in that position, but I can certainly call it a plausible claim that tax policies favoring finance capital, employer-tilted labor policies, and a trade policy of running huge deficits could hurt the employment market generally, or specifically lead to a situation in which the employment market bisects into a high-value highly-mechanized elite and a low-value mass of less-skilled laborers.
The one thing I am highly confident in is that the level of perceived skill or expertise needed to belong to the well-paid/overburdened “skilled elite” has risen.
You linked to a Reddit discussion about the article, where currently the “best” rated comment is: “I totally don’t get the logic here.” :D
I didn’t read the original paper, but from the article it seems to me their main argument is that under the hypothesis of skill-demand gap we would see the decrease of high-paying jobs and increase of low-paying jobs (which happened) accompanied with rising wages of the low-paying jobs (which didn’t happen, and therefore the hypothesis is false).
Let’s imagine that someone loses their high-paying job because it became too complex. For example, tomorrow the whole IT business will switch from Java to Lisp, but I am unable to learn Lisp, so I lose my job. So I become a retail clerk. Why exactly should I expect a higher wage than other retails clerks? If the same thing happened to many people, I would actually expect retail clerk wages decreasing, because now there is a greater labor supply in the industry.
Similar objections were already stated in the Reddit discussion.
At least in the classical economic theory, the idea is that you and other displaced Java programmers are more skilled than the average retail worker before the switch to LISP, and at least part of those skills are transferrable. Probably not the Java programming, but at least the math, job awareness, and other various generalist skills that are part of higher-profile jobs.
((This falls apart in extremes because many job skills don’t transfer or are even counter-useful, and employers have reasons to avoid hiring high-investment workers who have other better job offers available.))
Yeah, since there was some controversy about it, I wanted to link to the controversy rather than just give one viewpoint alone.
I’m mostly trying to support the thesis that public policy has an impact, and that impact is worth investigating. The only thing I want to refute is technological determinism.
Show me the data.