Jobs are not a scarce resource. Employees are. We do not have approximately 100% employment because the number of people is about the same as the number of jobs. We do because as long as there are people available we will be willing to hire them for some amount of money. If they have nothing better to do, they’ll take it. If there’s no jobs worth doing, they won’t look for them, and won’t be counted towards the statistic.
As what some longer living jobs might be:
AI programmer would be an obvious example. The last jobs will go when they finish their job.
Engineer. Someone has to design the machines that take everyone’s jobs.
Entrepreneur.
Maid. Hard for machines to do, and could single-handedly soak up half the workforce, at least. (I’m not sure how maids’ maids would work.)
Any job that machines can do, but targeted towards upper classes.
Historically your thesis has been frequently disputed, and the people disputing it have always been proven wrong. Population increases 10-fold? That doesn’t mean 90% unemployment, because now there are also 10 times as much demand for the products that new jobs can create. Automation puts 90% of farmers out of work? Fine, they’ll just eventually go back to work producing the products newly demanded by the remaining much-more-productive farmers and each other.
There do seem to be a couple limits on how far that process can go, though.
One is the Malthusian limit. Recast in economic terms, there is a finite amount of capital around, and as the population of labor increases past it, the price of the latter in terms of the former can be expected to drop below subsistence level. This keeps conspicuously not happening to humans, mostly because technology keeps improving the capital value of existing material goods, but it seems unwise to count on it not happening forever. This limit happens to other animal species all the time when their expansion into new territory hits its carrying capacity, and the results aren’t something we’d be happy with for humanity.
The other is the “robot world” limit. Although fears of “androids will take all our jobs” have mostly been replaced by “computers and industrial machines will work alongside us and make our jobs way more productive”, something more like the former could still happen eventually. This one has also already been observed happening to other species, surprisingly. Technologies like saddles, horseshoes, horse collars, carts, etc. made horses more and more productive, more and more popular… right up until the invention of the internal combustion engine, at which point most horses were no longer worth the cost of boarding them.
In either case, the safest job is “person with capital”. That either means enough economic capital to be self-sufficient via (possibly collective) production and trade without asymmetric employment, or enough political capital to convince the angry unemployed mob to give you a big share of the spoils when they fleece the people with economic capital. But now we’re veering into politics and I’ll stop.
There will be enough jobs. Whether or not you can live on the pay isn’t guaranteed. If there’s too many people, or even if the gap between the rich and poor is too large, the pay of the lowest jobs can fall below subsistence level.
This keeps conspicuously not happening to humans
The general version hasn’t. I think there has been times when the wage for untrained labor has fallen below subsistence.
The other is the “robot world” limit.
If robots do every kind of manual labor for us, there will still be jobs. The only limit is when they do the manual labor and the mental labor. It’s not the robot world limit. It’s the singularity.
That still very well might not get rid of jobs. It’s unlikely that people as we know them are the best at any job, but as long as you have them around, and they’re going to have those pretend MMORPG jobs anyway, it might be best to use some of them.
In either case, the safest job is “person with capital”.
Strictly speaking, that’s the only kind of job. Being good at something is considered human capital.
I’d agree that “person with monetary capital” will be a job that will last up until the end.
This isn’t really relevant, but it’s worth commenting on. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m arguing with you, but we seem to be in agreement.
The malthusian limit used to happen to people all the time. You can graph population against various supporting resources and watch it rise and fall in large regions historically. What is confusing the issue is that the industrial age has exploded productivity so much that we have not had a modern malthusian disaster. We came within a few inventions of having one in the 1960s or 1970s but the green revolution inventions aced that one out.
Current trends suggest the mid-term future of earth’s population is maxing at about 10 billion and then falling slowly. This will put off any malthusian disasters through the mid-term.
I HIGHLY recommend “The Rational Optimist” by Matt Ridley. Most amazing collection of useful points of view and information I have seen in a long time. Collapse by Jared Diamond is also a fun compendium of local malthusian disasters over the millenia.
Maid. Hard for machines to do, and could single-handedly soak up half the workforce, at least. (I’m not sure how maids’ maids would work.)
Any job that machines can do, but targeted towards upper classes.
I find it pretty easy to imagine a future where rich/still-employed people regularly employ groups of servants, or maintain an entourage. It has a lot of historical precedent, and is already the case in many parts of the world.
Good point about the rich. Even now, a hand-painted painting by the original artist costs way more than even an extremely good copy made by a hired painter with great skill, which costs more than signed limited-edition reproductions, which cost more than unsigned reproductions. We only need a few zillionaires who value original art to keep a number of people employed as painters.
I suspect in the real world, production will tend to distribute across people in such a way that any system with more production will tend to have a higher amount of stuff owned by even its poorest, no matter how good the machines. If a trivial picture of capitalism puts all of a tremendous amount of wealth in a minority’s hands, that minority will have to be willing to slaughter viciously parts of the marjority to “protect” its property rights. If you are that rich, why would you be willing to do something so distasteful? Better to just let things get reorganized and only have a tenth or a hundredth of the zillions of dollars you theoretically would have had under the old organization.
Some people value “hand made” things, so there will be some market.
I would use machines to help me make those “hand made” things faster. Seriously, even with laws, some use of machines would be allowed; I just need to find a way to use it to maximize my total productivity. For example, even if the product must be done by my own hands, is it OK if a machine guides my hands, provided that the machine parts will not touch the product? I could watch some movie while the machine moves my hands to do the work.
Perhaps I don’t even have to be in the room… either cut my hands off and replace them with superior prosthetics, or clone additional hands, and attach them to the machine while I take a nap.
In that case I would clone all my body (except the brain), put it in the other room and put a webcam there, so my clients will have real-time proof that I am not cheating.
After some more thinking… perhaps it would be easier to generate a false webcam output. :-D
It is virtually always the case that you can get a job, you just can’t get one that meets some rather stringent criteria for longer than you expected it to take to get such a job.
Labor is a productive input, out of equilibrium it can be wasted but eventually a system will tend to employ it fairly efficiently , which doesn’t leave much of it laying around unused.
Jobs shouldn’t be a scarce resource, but markets can stay out of equilibrium for a surprisingly long time and economies can fail to produce as much as they are capable of doing. Right now, in the U.S., there are about five times as many unemployed workers as there are job openings, and there have been times when things were worse, most notably during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Lawless areas seem to have gigantically lower productivity than lawful areas. ALL the high per capita productivity regions of the world have overwhelmingly strong governments providing physical security to lives and property at extraordinarily high levels.
Do you have any evidence that lawless areas do economically better in ANY measure than heavily regulated areas?
Lawless areas seem to have gigantically lower productivity than lawful areas. ALL the high per capita productivity regions of the world have overwhelmingly strong governments providing physical security to lives and property at extraordinarily high levels.
Do you have any evidence that lawless areas do economically better in ANY measure than heavily regulated areas?
That would be a rather bizarre thing for me to be try to provide evidence for. I have not and would not assert any similar thing. That’s the most surprising thing I’ve had appear in my inbox for ages!
My comment was merely an agreement with CronoDAS that in practice markets are not perfectly efficient and acknowledgement that with respect to job markets in particular things like minimum wage laws contribute to this. And you know what? Without claiming much expertise and so with rather low confidence I say minimum wage laws are a good thing. Ours (in Aus.) are comparatively high (compared to, say, the US) and it seems to work fine.
Jobs are not a scarce resource. Employees are. We do not have approximately 100% employment because the number of people is about the same as the number of jobs. We do because as long as there are people available we will be willing to hire them for some amount of money. If they have nothing better to do, they’ll take it. If there’s no jobs worth doing, they won’t look for them, and won’t be counted towards the statistic.
As what some longer living jobs might be:
AI programmer would be an obvious example. The last jobs will go when they finish their job.
Engineer. Someone has to design the machines that take everyone’s jobs.
Entrepreneur.
Maid. Hard for machines to do, and could single-handedly soak up half the workforce, at least. (I’m not sure how maids’ maids would work.)
Any job that machines can do, but targeted towards upper classes.
Historically your thesis has been frequently disputed, and the people disputing it have always been proven wrong. Population increases 10-fold? That doesn’t mean 90% unemployment, because now there are also 10 times as much demand for the products that new jobs can create. Automation puts 90% of farmers out of work? Fine, they’ll just eventually go back to work producing the products newly demanded by the remaining much-more-productive farmers and each other.
There do seem to be a couple limits on how far that process can go, though.
One is the Malthusian limit. Recast in economic terms, there is a finite amount of capital around, and as the population of labor increases past it, the price of the latter in terms of the former can be expected to drop below subsistence level. This keeps conspicuously not happening to humans, mostly because technology keeps improving the capital value of existing material goods, but it seems unwise to count on it not happening forever. This limit happens to other animal species all the time when their expansion into new territory hits its carrying capacity, and the results aren’t something we’d be happy with for humanity.
The other is the “robot world” limit. Although fears of “androids will take all our jobs” have mostly been replaced by “computers and industrial machines will work alongside us and make our jobs way more productive”, something more like the former could still happen eventually. This one has also already been observed happening to other species, surprisingly. Technologies like saddles, horseshoes, horse collars, carts, etc. made horses more and more productive, more and more popular… right up until the invention of the internal combustion engine, at which point most horses were no longer worth the cost of boarding them.
In either case, the safest job is “person with capital”. That either means enough economic capital to be self-sufficient via (possibly collective) production and trade without asymmetric employment, or enough political capital to convince the angry unemployed mob to give you a big share of the spoils when they fleece the people with economic capital. But now we’re veering into politics and I’ll stop.
There will be enough jobs. Whether or not you can live on the pay isn’t guaranteed. If there’s too many people, or even if the gap between the rich and poor is too large, the pay of the lowest jobs can fall below subsistence level.
The general version hasn’t. I think there has been times when the wage for untrained labor has fallen below subsistence.
If robots do every kind of manual labor for us, there will still be jobs. The only limit is when they do the manual labor and the mental labor. It’s not the robot world limit. It’s the singularity.
That still very well might not get rid of jobs. It’s unlikely that people as we know them are the best at any job, but as long as you have them around, and they’re going to have those pretend MMORPG jobs anyway, it might be best to use some of them.
Strictly speaking, that’s the only kind of job. Being good at something is considered human capital.
I’d agree that “person with monetary capital” will be a job that will last up until the end.
This isn’t really relevant, but it’s worth commenting on. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m arguing with you, but we seem to be in agreement.
The malthusian limit used to happen to people all the time. You can graph population against various supporting resources and watch it rise and fall in large regions historically. What is confusing the issue is that the industrial age has exploded productivity so much that we have not had a modern malthusian disaster. We came within a few inventions of having one in the 1960s or 1970s but the green revolution inventions aced that one out.
Current trends suggest the mid-term future of earth’s population is maxing at about 10 billion and then falling slowly. This will put off any malthusian disasters through the mid-term.
I HIGHLY recommend “The Rational Optimist” by Matt Ridley. Most amazing collection of useful points of view and information I have seen in a long time. Collapse by Jared Diamond is also a fun compendium of local malthusian disasters over the millenia.
I find it pretty easy to imagine a future where rich/still-employed people regularly employ groups of servants, or maintain an entourage. It has a lot of historical precedent, and is already the case in many parts of the world.
Good point about the rich. Even now, a hand-painted painting by the original artist costs way more than even an extremely good copy made by a hired painter with great skill, which costs more than signed limited-edition reproductions, which cost more than unsigned reproductions. We only need a few zillionaires who value original art to keep a number of people employed as painters.
I suspect in the real world, production will tend to distribute across people in such a way that any system with more production will tend to have a higher amount of stuff owned by even its poorest, no matter how good the machines. If a trivial picture of capitalism puts all of a tremendous amount of wealth in a minority’s hands, that minority will have to be willing to slaughter viciously parts of the marjority to “protect” its property rights. If you are that rich, why would you be willing to do something so distasteful? Better to just let things get reorganized and only have a tenth or a hundredth of the zillions of dollars you theoretically would have had under the old organization.
Some people value “hand made” things, so there will be some market.
I would use machines to help me make those “hand made” things faster. Seriously, even with laws, some use of machines would be allowed; I just need to find a way to use it to maximize my total productivity. For example, even if the product must be done by my own hands, is it OK if a machine guides my hands, provided that the machine parts will not touch the product? I could watch some movie while the machine moves my hands to do the work.
Perhaps I don’t even have to be in the room… either cut my hands off and replace them with superior prosthetics, or clone additional hands, and attach them to the machine while I take a nap.
In that case I would clone all my body (except the brain), put it in the other room and put a webcam there, so my clients will have real-time proof that I am not cheating.
After some more thinking… perhaps it would be easier to generate a false webcam output. :-D
Jobs are indeed a scarce resource when you can’t get one.
It is virtually always the case that you can get a job, you just can’t get one that meets some rather stringent criteria for longer than you expected it to take to get such a job.
Labor is a productive input, out of equilibrium it can be wasted but eventually a system will tend to employ it fairly efficiently , which doesn’t leave much of it laying around unused.
Jobs shouldn’t be a scarce resource, but markets can stay out of equilibrium for a surprisingly long time and economies can fail to produce as much as they are capable of doing. Right now, in the U.S., there are about five times as many unemployed workers as there are job openings, and there have been times when things were worse, most notably during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Even McDonalds is getting more far more applicants than it wants to hire.
Especially when there are laws involved!
Lawless areas seem to have gigantically lower productivity than lawful areas. ALL the high per capita productivity regions of the world have overwhelmingly strong governments providing physical security to lives and property at extraordinarily high levels.
Do you have any evidence that lawless areas do economically better in ANY measure than heavily regulated areas?
That would be a rather bizarre thing for me to be try to provide evidence for. I have not and would not assert any similar thing. That’s the most surprising thing I’ve had appear in my inbox for ages!
My comment was merely an agreement with CronoDAS that in practice markets are not perfectly efficient and acknowledgement that with respect to job markets in particular things like minimum wage laws contribute to this. And you know what? Without claiming much expertise and so with rather low confidence I say minimum wage laws are a good thing. Ours (in Aus.) are comparatively high (compared to, say, the US) and it seems to work fine.