OK, so I’m trying to understand what evidence you need to update your belief that the economy seeks equilibrium at a point where employment is high. I’ll try to make a structural/theoretical argument against the economic theory in the mean time.
One Micro-economic assumption is that the marginal value of their work is positive, which you claim is true.
I’ll point out that coordination costs are significant, and the dynamic of creating and maintaining trust systems for small tasks is very significant—structuring monitoring so that your cost is still negligible is hard. (In the 1920s, the social enforcement mechanisms for preventing defection in contracts were stronger—local work, local families, etc.)
As direct evidence, I’ll also point out that your time to invest in employing others to do low-value tasks is limited, and I’m going to guess that despite having significant excess income compare to the US average, you employ very few people (even indirectly) in these ways, and your friends also do not do so. (Is that useful evidence?) Instead, there are tasks you simply chose to leave undone, or avoid needing. For instance, most well to do people I know buy non-iron shirts (for a large premium, $40-$50 extra) instead of having the laundromat, or other cheap labor iron their shirts (99c/shirt to clean and iron them, where I am.) The coordination issues around dropping off, picking up, and remembering the dry cleaning make it annoying, so we avoid it.
Another example; do you have a human assistant in India or China that you farm routine computer based tasks out to? (Emails, editing, managing your schedule, researching random things you saw last month, etc.) Your time is limited, so why not? I’d assume it’s trust, training time to get them up to speed on what you need, ongoing costs of coordination driving down value, (and whatever else are you thinking of.)
(Post-post edit: I realize that you are looking at computer replacement of human jobs, but I think that structural unemployment is high because there are few jobs left that it’s worth having anyone do who is not highly trained and smart, and as Gwern said, we live in a high-IQ bubble.)
OK, so I’m trying to understand what evidence you need to update your belief that the economy seeks equilibrium at a point where employment is high. I’ll try to make a structural/theoretical argument against the economic theory in the mean time.
One Micro-economic assumption is that the marginal value of their work is positive, which you claim is true.
I’ll point out that coordination costs are significant, and the dynamic of creating and maintaining trust systems for small tasks is very significant—structuring monitoring so that your cost is still negligible is hard. (In the 1920s, the social enforcement mechanisms for preventing defection in contracts were stronger—local work, local families, etc.)
As direct evidence, I’ll also point out that your time to invest in employing others to do low-value tasks is limited, and I’m going to guess that despite having significant excess income compare to the US average, you employ very few people (even indirectly) in these ways, and your friends also do not do so. (Is that useful evidence?) Instead, there are tasks you simply chose to leave undone, or avoid needing. For instance, most well to do people I know buy non-iron shirts (for a large premium, $40-$50 extra) instead of having the laundromat, or other cheap labor iron their shirts (99c/shirt to clean and iron them, where I am.) The coordination issues around dropping off, picking up, and remembering the dry cleaning make it annoying, so we avoid it.
Another example; do you have a human assistant in India or China that you farm routine computer based tasks out to? (Emails, editing, managing your schedule, researching random things you saw last month, etc.) Your time is limited, so why not? I’d assume it’s trust, training time to get them up to speed on what you need, ongoing costs of coordination driving down value, (and whatever else are you thinking of.)
(Post-post edit: I realize that you are looking at computer replacement of human jobs, but I think that structural unemployment is high because there are few jobs left that it’s worth having anyone do who is not highly trained and smart, and as Gwern said, we live in a high-IQ bubble.)