Jobs being lost is a good thing

Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you:

No adverts like this in the forums anymore.
Times and dates in your local timezone.
Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance.
Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely.
Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net.

If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

**LordofHats**

streamdragon wrote:
AlexHolker wrote:
Scorpionov wrote:
jobs being lost is never a good thing....who was allowed to even write this?

Someone who knows more about the subject than you, apparently. It's quite simple: the reason a job is good is what it produces (an income for you, and outputs for your employer and their customers), not the job itself. Jobs lost to increased efficiency are thus a good thing, if the lost income is replaced by another source.

Think of a post-scarcity utopia where robots do the work so you don't have to. Does it really matter if you don't have a job, if the work is still being done and you're still getting paid?
Wait, why am I still getting paid if the robot is doing my job?

We'll just do what Kuwait does

**kronk**

streamdragon wrote:
AlexHolker wrote:
Scorpionov wrote:
jobs being lost is never a good thing....who was allowed to even write this?

Someone who knows more about the subject than you, apparently. It's quite simple: the reason a job is good is what it produces (an income for you, and outputs for your employer and their customers), not the job itself. Jobs lost to increased efficiency are thus a good thing, if the lost income is replaced by another source.

Think of a post-scarcity utopia where robots do the work so you don't have to. Does it really matter if you don't have a job, if the work is still being done and you're still getting paid?
Wait, why am I still getting paid if the robot is doing my job?

They need someone to maintain the robot, program it, etc.

**LordofHats**

We can just make a robot for that too

**streamdragon**

kronk wrote:
streamdragon wrote:
AlexHolker wrote:
Scorpionov wrote:
jobs being lost is never a good thing....who was allowed to even write this?

Someone who knows more about the subject than you, apparently. It's quite simple: the reason a job is good is what it produces (an income for you, and outputs for your employer and their customers), not the job itself. Jobs lost to increased efficiency are thus a good thing, if the lost income is replaced by another source.

Think of a post-scarcity utopia where robots do the work so you don't have to. Does it really matter if you don't have a job, if the work is still being done and you're still getting paid?
Wait, why am I still getting paid if the robot is doing my job?

They need someone to maintain the robot, program it, etc.

Those people are getting paid then, but unless my job was maintaining or programming said robot, I still have no job.

If those things were, in fact, my job then I am no safer as a robot has already replaced me once!

**kronk**

I'm not entirely sure what this meant, either, on second look: "Does it really matter if you don't have a job, if the work is still being done and you're still getting paid?"

**Easy E**

I think he means in a Utopia, money no longer matters. Robots can provide the labor and the production. All that matters is do you have the resources to create/replace the robots.

Your time and creative output would become the new "currency".

**kronk**

Oh. Like in Star Trek.

**djones520**

Easy E wrote:
I think he means in a Utopia, money no longer matters. Robots can provide the labor and the production. All that matters is do you have the resources to create/replace the robots.

Your time and creative output would become the new "currency".

And once this becomes the situation, Slaanesh happens. Talk to the Eldar, they been there done that, got the tee-shirt and gnawed on soul.

**Frazzled**

You notice, they never showed the gazillions of lazy fat people on Star Trek?

If there ever was an empire ripe for rebellion by the Iron Men...

**SilverMK2**

Frazzled wrote:
You notice, they never showed the gazillions of lazy fat people on Star Trek?

If there ever was an empire ripe for rebellion by the Iron Men...

What do you think they burn in the warp drive?

**Easy E**

Frazzled wrote:
You notice, they never showed the gazillions of lazy fat people on Star Trek?

If there ever was an empire ripe for rebellion by the Iron Men...

That's why they call it a Utopia. There are no lazy, fat people.

**Ratbarf**

That's because whenever you go through a teleporter it doesn't take the fat along with you, nor the contents of your stomach and colon.

**sebster**

dogma wrote:
The issues of eliminating retail jobs is ancillary, what angers people is Walmart's treatment of its employees. Notably, the average Walmart employee makes ~12 USD/hr and the average Costco employee makes ~17 USD/hr. That this guy chose to ignore that is, at best, lazy journalism.

He's addressing the specifics of a single complaint made on Dailykos. There's only so much detail you can go in to in one blog post.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Ahtman wrote:
So it seems that what he is saying isn't so bad, and that it is more of an issue that he doesn't know how to write for an audience.

He's writing for Forbes, and complaining about Dailykos. I'd say he knows exactly who his audience is.

It's more that much of dakka isn't that audience, and doesn't like to hear what he has to say.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

streamdragon wrote:
Those people are getting paid then, but unless my job was maintaining or programming said robot, I still have no job.

If those things were, in fact, my job then I am no safer as a robot has already replaced me once!

People were saying much the same thing in 1850, as year on year less people were needed in agriculture. And yet we didn't end up with more and more unemployment. Instead those people moved in to new industries, and the economic production moved from being 'just enough food for people to eat and some nice things for the nobility' to 'just enough food for everyone to eat, some nice things for the nobility, and some other nice things for the new bourgeosie'. And then as farming improved yet again, and those new industries improved as well, we kept expanding how much stuff we produced.

That's the point of this whole process. When we figure out how to do the same thing with less resources, we don't just stop and then say 'and we'll just keep producing as much as we did before, and those people who used to have jobs and were part of the system will just be cast out in to poverty'... instead we make use of those efficiencies to make even more stuff. That, basically, is what economic growth is.

**scarletsquig**

The post-automata vision of the future depicted in Wall-E is far more likely than the vision depicted in Star Trek.

Biological immortality thanks to nanobot medics, every whim and desire catered for by robots, human knowledge of how to build or even maintain the technology rapidly disappears.

In the UK, we switched to a service economy 20 years ago, and now lack the skills required to build our own nuclear power planets (have to get France to build them for us)... great example of "use it or lose it".

**Easy E**

I think the article writer was pretty spot on about the role of Business and Labor in the Capitalist system.

However, he doesn't mention the fact that other actors within the system will have competing goals, and hence create "friction".

It is the role of all of the entities to "balance" or compete with the excesses of the others, therefore creating a seesaw effect as various entities gain traction for periods of time over the other entities.

**jimbutsu**

Ratbarf wrote:
That's because whenever you go through a teleporter it doesn't take the fat along with you, nor the contents of your stomach and colon.

So *this* is how Gwyneth Paltrow does it!

(I'm so ashamed that this is my first post)

**Cheesecat**

scarletsquig wrote:
nuclear power planets

Holy gak.

**kronk**

Ratbarf wrote:
That's because whenever you go through a teleporter it doesn't take the fat along with you, nor the contents of your stomach and colon.

Which they then recycle into the replicator.

**daedalus**

Holy gak, is that one of the Next Generation trading cards they came out with in the early 90s?

I remember those as a kid.

**Jihadin**

Saudi Arabia can't find enough executioners to carry out its barbaric brand of justice, according to reports.

The Kingdom is actively soliciting applicants who can be trained to behead people sentenced to death under Sharia law, according to Vatican Insider. While the problem may shine a light on Saudi Arabia's frightening justice system, it also could show a more humane population, according to the Asia Times.

“Fewer people are interested in a "career" in executing others, a task that requires a lot of cold blood and a lot of training to be able to swing a sword properly,” Asia Times reported.

The executioners who are on the job are doing double duty, as the number of death penalties meted out has not slowed. Some 76 people were put to death in 2012, and 40 have already been put to death this year. The most recent case took place on May 14 in the southwestern city of Najran, where a man was beheaded after being convicted of murdering a fellow tribesman. The ultimate penalty is applied in Saudi Arabia in cases of murder, armed robbery, rape, drug trafficking, witchcraft and sodomy.

Human rights groups and western groups have tried to influence Saudi Arabia to implement more fair trials and less cruel methods of execution. It remains the only country in the world where beheadings are carried out in public places.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/06/07/saudi-arabia-jobs-problem-not-enough-exectutioners/?intcmp=obnetwork#ixzz2VwgWRISA

Certain grps are fully behind that some job lost is a great thing........

**Ratbarf**

^I wonder how one applies to that job. "Hello, I would like to cold bloodily kill people with a sword for money." I wonder how much they're paid.

**Easy E**

In the 13th and 14th Centruy Germany (Holy Roman Empire), it was a very unforgiving profession. You were allowed three chops. If you failed to behead your victim, your head was then put on the chopping block!

**Kovnik Obama**

sebster wrote:
I don't think the article was all that troublesome.

I mean, he's just pointing out something that should be pretty basic knowledge - businesses aren't there to create jobs. They're there to figure out how to do a better job with less resources. While that can mean job cuts in the short term, ultimately having less people working to deliver the same product, and having those people retrain and move in to other economic sectors is what economic growth is.

And yeah, it sucks for people who lose their jobs. Just like it sucked for British people when the tradition of open field agriculture ended and the farms were enclosed, forcing those people to look for work in the cities. It definitely sucked for those caught in that transition, but that drove the industrial revolution, and without it we wouldn't have the modern world.

Now, that doesn't mean that job loss should just be viewed passively by government. Everyone of those newly unemployed people is a part of society, and also a potential worker who can add to the economy. In terms of both social policy and the public good it is good to get them working again, either by helping them develop new skills, or by helping them locate to a place where their skills are needed.

But this idea that we should somehow just stop companies doing things better, because that means job cuts... I agree with the guy in the blog - that idea is just plain wrong.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Kovnik Obama wrote:
''Using less labour to perform one specific task frees up that labour to go and perform other tasks. This is good, this is progress. '' But it isn't when you don't have something else to assign that workforce to. Or the time to train them. And during the mean time those people need money. This is the most glaring flaw in his logic.

Well, if you're going to work with the assumption that job lost from the economy will never be recreated elsewhere, then your complaint makes sense.

But your assumption flies in the face of 400 years of economic history. Seriously, they put up those enclosures in Britain and forced a massive portion of the population out of their lives as subsistance farmers... and yet the UK didn't just produce 400 years of inter-generational poverty as those people and their ancestors never ever worked again. They moved in to new industries. This is not only a thing that's possible, it's a thing that happens to almost all of those displaced worked, every single time.

''And what is it that WalMart actually is? It’s simply a new technology for retailing goods.'' No it's not. Words have specific meanings. ''Next-gen retailer'' isn't one of ''technology''.

No, 'technology' is used in that sense in economics and economic history. When dealing with how economies grow, there are three broad categories of drivers of growth - population growth, capital growth, and technology. That last category is broad one, dealing with any kind of innovation that leads to people doing more with less resources.

Sorry for the delay in answering, I've wanted to write something back all week but couldn't find the time or will, it seems.

I think the problem I have with his article's author is the inadequacy of his answer in relation to the problem he himself chooses as the subject. Like Dogma said, people don't complain so much about Wal Mart taking out jobs than they do about the poor quality of jobs, something the author doesn't address in much details. Furthermore, when people actually complain about Wal Mart taking people's jobs, they don't do it in an economist's manner (and that's a good thing). What I mean by this is that normal people, those that complain about how gakky Wal-Mart is, don't care about the fact that Wal-Mart just deducted a net 20, 30, or 50 jobs out of the employment pool in a given community. What they care about is that 20, 30 or 50 families are now (potentially) in a stressful economic situation, and that the others who got re-employed actually lost a good part of their income.

Which is why saying ''but in 4 generations, you'll see, the percentage of people that used to work in retail will have entirely migrated to another economic sector'' to anyone but another economist, in a very specific situation, will get you treated like a lunatic. Because that's not how normal people think. It would be like saying to someone who complains about being colour blind that in a few generations, colour blindness might reveal itself to be a great mutation to have, and that he shouldn't complain about it, it's not a bug, but an actual feature of evolution. Yes, you'd be technically right in saying that. But more importantly, you'd be a moron who missed the point about how it sucks RIGHT NOW FOR THIS INDIVIDUAL to be colour blind.

tl;dr version : Its a sucky article because it's author assumes a meaning to the complaint raised against Wal-Mart which almost no one actually mean. An answer which demands that you leave the individual point of view to re-focus on the inter-generationnal one won't satisfy anyone complaining about the individual repercussions. Had the author given himself a different aim with this article, this would have been fine.

**sebster**

Kovnik Obama wrote:
Sorry for the delay in answering, I've wanted to write something back all week but couldn't find the time or will, it seems.

Not a problem.

I think the problem I have with his article's author is the inadequacy of his answer in relation to the problem he himself chooses as the subject. Like Dogma said, people don't complain so much about Wal Mart taking out jobs than they do about the poor quality of jobs, something the author doesn't address in much details.

I think that's a fair point both dogma and yourself are making - the author is most definitely picking his argument, and ignoring other points about Walmart without such a defence. The issue of Walmart's jobs being gakky jobs is a whole other issue, reflective of a business practice of turning formerly skilled & semi-skilled jobs into unskilled jobs (with the gakky rate of pay that goes with that), while more of the revenue generated is funnelled upwards to senior management and shareholders. I mean, you have 10 small stores each with a store manager earning $50,000 a year, and then they all get closed down as a new Walmart takes their business, paying one Store Manager $100,000 and nine underlings $20,000... and it shouldn't be too hard to figure out why income equality is going the wrong way.

It's just that on the issue he did pick there has been a lot of people making complaints, and I think the point he makes is solid, and it's an issue that some people here and elsewhere looked to argue against.

Which is why saying ''but in 4 generations, you'll see, the percentage of people that used to work in retail will have entirely migrated to another economic sector'' to anyone but another economist, in a very specific situation, will get you treated like a lunatic. Because that's not how normal people think. It would be like saying to someone who complains about being colour blind that in a few generations, colour blindness might reveal itself to be a great mutation to have, and that he shouldn't complain about it, it's not a bug, but an actual feature of evolution. Yes, you'd be technically right in saying that. But more importantly, you'd be a moron who missed the point about how it sucks RIGHT NOW FOR THIS INDIVIDUAL to be colour blind.

Well, it doesn't take four generations. Unemployment, outside of uniquely gak circumstances like right now, is generally measured in months. And yes, there are people for whom it lasts much longer, and that sucks for them. And yeah, even when that unemployment only lasts a few months, it's still a really stressful, awful time.

And so I agree that when the complaint is 'it really sucks for those people who just lost their jobs', it makes no sense to reply 'well don't worry, their jobs are now being done more efficiently and they will move elsewhere in the economy that's the magic of capitalism'.

It's more that the complaint heard quite often is 'it really sucks for those people who just lost their jobs, and so Walmart is wrong for being a company that makes its processes more efficient and needing less labour'... to which the answer 'that work is being done more efficiently, freeing up labour to be used in new production, which is the process we used to drag ourselves from a medieval economy to the modern economy' is quite fair.

tl;dr version : Its a sucky article because it's author assumes a meaning to the complaint raised against Wal-Mart which almost no one actually mean.

I guess our point of disagreement is that I hear that argument fairly often.

**Ahtman**

Unemployment, outside of uniquely gak circumstances

Like having a Liberal Arts degree!

Spoiler:

**sebster**

Ahtman wrote:
Like having a Liberal Arts degree!

Ha!

**Easy E**

Ahtman wrote:
Unemployment, outside of uniquely gak circumstances

Like having a Liberal Arts degree!

Spoiler:

Everyone knows STEM is the ONLY way to make a living!

**Kovnik Obama**

sebster wrote:

I guess our point of disagreement is that I hear that argument fairly often.

Fair point ; different people will focus differently on the same issue.

One other point to note : the author doesn't actually respond to the Dailykos criticism of Wal-Mart. The article linked (titled ''The Walmartization of the American food chain is making communities poor and poorly fed'') pretty much has nothing to do with the issue of loss of jobs. The quote which starts the Forbes article is simply a supporting point which underlines the fact that communities in which Wal-Mart implants itself are poorer afterwards. The Forbes author even cut short said quote from Dailykos to leave out the end :

These shifts may explain the findings of another study, published in Social Science Quarterly in 2006, which cut straight to the bottom line: neighborhoods where Walmart opens end up with higher poverty rates and more food-stamp usage than places where the retailer does not expand.''

The article as a lot more to do with the fact that Wal-Mart is holding 25% of the grocery market in the U.S and about the perception that this is problematic and linked to higher poverty rates and worse nutrition (although the Dailykos author doesn't address that last part either, just mentions it). Its seems to me that its much more of a complaint about a perceived 'oligarchy' or move toward oligarchy on the grocery market.

So not only is the author picking his fights, but he's also misrepresenting the position of (and even the entire issue raised by) the Dailykos writer.

**Relapse**

Kovnik Obama wrote:
sebster wrote:
I don't think the article was all that troublesome.

I mean, he's just pointing out something that should be pretty basic knowledge - businesses aren't there to create jobs. They're there to figure out how to do a better job with less resources. While that can mean job cuts in the short term, ultimately having less people working to deliver the same product, and having those people retrain and move in to other economic sectors is what economic growth is.

And yeah, it sucks for people who lose their jobs. Just like it sucked for British people when the tradition of open field agriculture ended and the farms were enclosed, forcing those people to look for work in the cities. It definitely sucked for those caught in that transition, but that drove the industrial revolution, and without it we wouldn't have the modern world.

Now, that doesn't mean that job loss should just be viewed passively by government. Everyone of those newly unemployed people is a part of society, and also a potential worker who can add to the economy. In terms of both social policy and the public good it is good to get them working again, either by helping them develop new skills, or by helping them locate to a place where their skills are needed.

But this idea that we should somehow just stop companies doing things better, because that means job cuts... I agree with the guy in the blog - that idea is just plain wrong.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Kovnik Obama wrote:
''Using less labour to perform one specific task frees up that labour to go and perform other tasks. This is good, this is progress. '' But it isn't when you don't have something else to assign that workforce to. Or the time to train them. And during the mean time those people need money. This is the most glaring flaw in his logic.

Well, if you're going to work with the assumption that job lost from the economy will never be recreated elsewhere, then your complaint makes sense.

But your assumption flies in the face of 400 years of economic history. Seriously, they put up those enclosures in Britain and forced a massive portion of the population out of their lives as subsistance farmers... and yet the UK didn't just produce 400 years of inter-generational poverty as those people and their ancestors never ever worked again. They moved in to new industries. This is not only a thing that's possible, it's a thing that happens to almost all of those displaced worked, every single time.

''And what is it that WalMart actually is? It’s simply a new technology for retailing goods.'' No it's not. Words have specific meanings. ''Next-gen retailer'' isn't one of ''technology''.

No, 'technology' is used in that sense in economics and economic history. When dealing with how economies grow, there are three broad categories of drivers of growth - population growth, capital growth, and technology. That last category is broad one, dealing with any kind of innovation that leads to people doing more with less resources.

Sorry for the delay in answering, I've wanted to write something back all week but couldn't find the time or will, it seems.

I think the problem I have with his article's author is the inadequacy of his answer in relation to the problem he himself chooses as the subject. Like Dogma said, people don't complain so much about Wal Mart taking out jobs than they do about the poor quality of jobs, something the author doesn't address in much details. Furthermore, when people actually complain about Wal Mart taking people's jobs, they don't do it in an economist's manner (and that's a good thing). What I mean by this is that normal people, those that complain about how gakky Wal-Mart is, don't care about the fact that Wal-Mart just deducted a net 20, 30, or 50 jobs out of the employment pool in a given community. What they care about is that 20, 30 or 50 families are now (potentially) in a stressful economic situation, and that the others who got re-employed actually lost a good part of their income.

Which is why saying ''but in 4 generations, you'll see, the percentage of people that used to work in retail will have entirely migrated to another economic sector'' to anyone but another economist, in a very specific situation, will get you treated like a lunatic. Because that's not how normal people think. It would be like saying to someone who complains about being colour blind that in a few generations, colour blindness might reveal itself to be a great mutation to have, and that he shouldn't complain about it, it's not a bug, but an actual feature of evolution. Yes, you'd be technically right in saying that. But more importantly, you'd be a moron who missed the point about how it sucks RIGHT NOW FOR THIS INDIVIDUAL to be colour blind.

tl;dr version : Its a sucky article because it's author assumes a meaning to the complaint raised against Wal-Mart which almost no one actually mean. An answer which demands that you leave the individual point of view to re-focus on the inter-generationnal one won't satisfy anyone complaining about the individual repercussions. Had the author given himself a different aim with this article, this would have been fine.

Exalted.

**sebster**

Kovnik Obama wrote:
One other point to note : the author doesn't actually respond to the Dailykos criticism of Wal-Mart. The article linked (titled ''The Walmartization of the American food chain is making communities poor and poorly fed'') pretty much has nothing to do with the issue of loss of jobs. The quote which starts the Forbes article is simply a supporting point which underlines the fact that communities in which Wal-Mart implants itself are poorer afterwards. The Forbes author even cut short said quote from Dailykos to leave out the end :

These shifts may explain the findings of another study, published in Social Science Quarterly in 2006, which cut straight to the bottom line: neighborhoods where Walmart opens end up with higher poverty rates and more food-stamp usage than places where the retailer does not expand.''

Ah, fair enough. I didn't click on the article the author linked to. I accept he was being disingenuous in his argument by looking only at the issue of job losses then.

The article as a lot more to do with the fact that Wal-Mart is holding 25% of the grocery market in the U.S and about the perception that this is problematic and linked to higher poverty rates and worse nutrition (although the Dailykos author doesn't address that last part either, just mentions it). Its seems to me that its much more of a complaint about a perceived 'oligarchy' or move toward oligarchy on the grocery market.

In Australia there are two retail companies with a combined market share that's pushing 80% of the market. And yeah, it's a gak state of affairs.

And while Walmart is bad, I think they are to a large extent just the highest profile company in what is a new economic force - in which middle rank jobs are consolidated in to fewer and fewer hands (through efficiency at a national level and more advanced systems) while the jobs left are basic, low income jobs. It's a real economic problem.