The Job Guarantee: What About Automation?
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- Опубліковано 20 вер 2024
- Professor L. Randall Wray, on with Steve Grumbine at Real Progressives, discussing automation and the Job Guarantee. One of the arguments sometimes made against the Job Guarantee is that, "well we don't need jobs. Automation is coming and it will destroy all jobs. Trying to give people jobs is clinging to the past."
It's true that automation destroys jobs. But this should be a good thing! If automation eliminates boring and grueling jobs, then this frees up people to be able to do things that are more fulfilling and creative.
"But this time is different," they say, "the automation will destroy all jobs, even creative ones."
Firstly, just look outside your door: how much stuff needs doing that's not being done? Sure, we can imagine robots making human labor unnecessary on a wide range of tasks, but the idea that it will become impossible for any person to meaningfully contribute to society through effort is ludicrous. There has always been more work to be done than people available to do it, and there always will be, because every time we become more technologically sophisticated, our standards and expectations about what quality of life should be like go up proportionately too.
What's more, the problem with automation is that it eliminates *paid* work, not the possibility of working. This might be an imperative for the private sector, to maximize profits, but it's not for society as a whole. There are many reasons why society might want humans to do jobs that robots could do, even if the robots could do it more profitably: perhaps consumers prefer interacting with a human (like doctors); there are some jobs that people enjoy doing and would rather do themselves than delegate to robots (like playing music, or teaching). The government, through its power to issue currency, can enable this.
Bottom-line: criticisms about automation generally mistake what the purpose of an "economy" is for: the economy exists to serve people, not the other way around. If something happening in the economy is not making life better for people, then we don't have to do it.
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Hello! Thanks for putting this up. I love learning about economics from you all. It changes my paradigm. I have enjoyed reading about basic income and job guarantee ideas, and I think you have hit on a key idea here. The problem is not that we need jobs. We can all see things that could use doing. The problem is that there needs to be a way to pay people to do those things. Good thinking. Thanks.
People who beleive that automation will take all the work that there is to do away from human beings have the same type of mindset that closes a patent office because they beleive all new ideas have been thought of. As long as we can think we will have new ideas, as long as we have new ideas we will have things to do. Also robots do not get paid for their work. If robots took all of the jobs, no one would get paid. If no one was paid, no one would purchase the things that the robots made.
The real problem of course is the present disastrous economics of faux capitalism, and the lack of paid work can be ‘easily’ resolved through the underpinnings of classic quantity theory of money (QTM) as well as modern monetary theory (MMT, Mosler).
Use the estimated or calculated amount of externalized environmental costs of our current unruly business model to financialize the millions of paid jobs necessary and anticipated to clean up this present unholy environmental unsustainable mess we're living in.
The reason that UBI is so important is that we should not have to suffer while people who are supposed to be creating useful work opportunities are incapable of creating those work opportunities. Potential work will always be available. Even if people desire the novelty of human service, that desire can generate demand for human work. But the idea that people ought to have a job to have an income, or ought to want a job, even if it is useless, is stupid.
There is work to be done in society, sure, but not actually that much. We just need to create cheap mid density mixed use buildings in our cities, and public transportation within and between them. There is a lot of immediate work to be done right now, but after we create the society that we want, the work that we will need done to live good lives within that society will significantly diminish. Sure, people can enjoy creating more bells and whistles on top of that. More games, more clothing, more knick knacks. But just maintaining a peaceful utopia is not going to be that difficult, labor wise. Crime will be way down, inefficiency related labor will be way down. Susceptibility to advertising would be way down. The option to be idle is an extremely important part of a better future.
exactly
(economists finally getting green, about time ..)
Why dun they automate toilet cleaning and taking out trash?
The threat to jobs due to automation is definitely not nonsense and history is no guide. I'm 100% onboard with a federal jobs guarantee, but this is a short-term solution. In the long run -- unless something catastrophic happens to stop all machine-intelligence progress -- there will be no human job that couldn't be done better by a machine, including economics. That's going to be a very different world. Fortunately, it's still quite a ways off. Major job disruption, however, is not that far off. Consider that we will likely see level 4 self-driving trucks within a decade. New job creation is not and will not keep up with displacement. So it's, without any question, a very serious long-term issue. The Luddite-fallacy does NOT apply to the coming age of intelligent machines. Sorry, but you guys are wrong on that one. (Hey, nobody's perfect.)
the jobs gaurantee is a great idea, but big data, mores law and just in time production technologies are going to make these debates redundant.
all well and good to have a debate about being more creative when it comes to new jobs in new economies, but what are we going to do when our technology gives us enough productivity gain so that a human being might only need to work 10 years may be less to earn their keep within society.
if we want to keep the currency system under that kind of productivity gain, then we are going to have to pay people to go surfing or be perpetual students, or we bring in population control, or we get rid of the currency system as we know it.
or a bit of all of the above
the end game in all of this over then next 500 years is that we are going to be high tech socialists, and capitalism will be dead . i mean why use market pricing with all the inefficiencies in clearing , and participants gaming the system, and just use pure allocation based on big data. you could argue where are the incentives for people to work under those arrangements, but if you told them we are so smart as a civilisation that you only have to put up with 5 years hard labour, and the rest of your life is yours to do what you want and we will take money out of the survival equation , think people are going to go for it
I'm skeptical of your premise that humans will barely need to work in the future. Perhaps if you assume that we will have our current standard of living in the future, then you'd be right. But history shows that whenever we become more productive, we do not merely produce the same amount with less work, we produce more.
For instance, when the laundry machine was invented, did that drastically reduce the amount of time spent doing laundry? Actually no. Because 200 years ago, people only did laundry twice- per year, whereas today they do it every few days. We used innovation to drastically improve the quality of life, while holding the amount of work roughly constant. And that's probably what we'll do again.
SG is a demagogue. Sad to see respectable academics abused this way