/biz/ - Business & Finance

People invoke the Industrial Revolution and say we have heard these fears before all the way back to the Luddites, that new jobs always appear. It is unknowable what the new jobs will be, as it is beyond human wisdom. Oftentimes the person who thinks that all will be okay is guilty of what I call constructive-institutionalism: Operating from a default stance that things will work-themselves-out. This is, to my mind, a disavowal of judgment and reality. History repeats itself until it doesn't.

Every innovation will bring with the new opportunities and some will be difficult to predict self-driving cars and trucks will bring with them a need for improved infrastructure and thus perhaps some construction jobs the demise of retail could make drone pilots more of a need over time the proliferation of data is already making data scientists a hot new job category. The problem is that the new jobs are almost certain to be in different places than existing ones and will be less numerous than the ones that disappear.

They will generally require higher levels of education than the displaced workers have, and it will be very unlikely for a displaced worker to move, identify the need, gain skills, and fill the new role. We can celebrate the 200 new robot supervisors in suburban California, and the 100 new logistics specialists in Memphis, and the 50 new web designers in Seattle and say "Hey, we didn't know we'd need these 350 college-educated people to manage robots that took thousands of jobs. Hooray!" Meanwhile there will be 50,000 unemployed retail employees who will be looking fruitlessly for opportunities in their shrinking communities.

>eliminated by the advent of self-driving vehicles.
it's NOT happening

>>16137329
I agree it's a problem but giving people $1,000 a month for free is a fucking horrible idea, the economy is going to have to evolve into something else, giving people free money just turns them into niggers.

One Department of Labor survey in 2012 found that 41 percent of displaced manufacturing workers between 2009 and 2011 were either still unemployed or dropped out of the labor market within three years of losing their jobs.

How do the 40 percent of displaced manufacturing workers who don’t find new jobs survive? The short answer is that many became destitute and applied for disability benefits. Disability rolls shot up starting in 2000, rising by 3.5 million, with the numbers increasing dramatically in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and other manufacturing-heavy states. In Michigan, about half of the 310,000 residents who left the workforce between 2003 and 2013 went on disability. Many displaced manufacturing workers essentially entered a new underclass of government dependents who have been left behind.

In places where jobs disappear, society falls apart. The public sector and civic institutions are poorly equipped to do much about it. When a community truly disintegrates, knitting it back together becomes a herculean, perhaps impossible task. Virtue, trust, and cohesion—the stuff of civilization—are difficult to restore. If anything, it’s striking how public corruption seems to often arrive hand-in-hand with economic hardship.

Morgan Stanley estimated the savings of automated freight delivery to be a staggering $168 billion per year in saved fuel ($35 billion), reduced labor costs ($70 billion), fewer accidents ($36 billion), and increased productivity and equipment utilization ($27 billion). That’s an enormously high incentive to show drivers to the door—it would actually be enough to pay the drivers their $40,000 a year salary to stay home and still save tens of billions per year.

Other autonomous vehicle companies report similar timelines, with 2020 being the first year of mass adoption. The market rewards business leaders for making things more efficient. Efficiency doesn’t love normal people.

To me without dramatic change the best-case scenario is a hyper stratified society like something out of The Hunger Games or Guatemala with an occasional mass shooting. The worse case is widespread despair, violence, and the utter collapse of our society and economy. This viewpoint may strike some as extreme, but consider though that trucking protests were common in the final days of the Soviet Union.

A large unemployed group of working age men is a common feature in middle eastern countries that experienced political upheaval and there are approximately 270 to 310 million. Those who have other options will flee the field. But for many their opportunities will be minimal and they know it. Many are ex-military. About 5% are Gulf War veterans, ~80,000 worked in transportation in 2012. They'll be proud and desperate. What might happen when the 350,000 American truckers who bought or leased their own trucks are unemployed due to automation and angry?

All it takes is one out of 350,000 to lead the others. It doesn't take a big leap of the imagination.

The best estimates for when this will unfold is between 2020 and 2030.

>>16137329
>November 4, 2019 of common era
>yang

gtfo my board faggot

The median household income was $59,309 in 2016. Each household typically consists of multiple family members, however. The median personal income in the U.S. was $31,099 in 2016 and the mean was $46,550. The relevant statistic for seeing how most people live and work is the median, as the mean gets dragged up by the handful of people making millions at the top. The median is the midpoint if you lined everyone up by income. Half of Americans make less than $31,099 and half make more, with 70 percent of individuals making $50K or less.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics places the median hourly wage at $17.40, which would mean about 35 hours of paid work per week over 50 weeks. This is consistent with the average of 34.4 hours reported by the OECD. So the average American worker has less than an associate’s degree and makes about $17 per hour.

A Bankrate survey in 2017 found that 59 percent of Americans don’t have the savings to pay an unexpected expense of $500 and would need to put it on a credit card, ask for help, or cut back for several months to manage it. A similar Federal Reserve report in 2015 said that 75 percent of Americans could not pay a $400 emergency expense out of their checking or savings accounts.

Yes, the top 20 percent own 92 percent of stock market holdings.

So what’s normal? The normal American did not graduate from college and doesn’t have an associate’s degree. He or she perhaps attended college for one year or graduated from high school. She or he has a net worth of approximately $36K—about $6K excluding home and vehicle equity—and lives paycheck to paycheck. She or he has less than $500 in flexible savings and minimal assets invested in the stock market. These are median statistics, with 50 percent of Americans below these levels.

The lack of mobility and growth has created a breeding ground for political hostility and social ills.

>>16137418
>common era
Get off my board

>>16137452
Based and anno domini pilled lets dab on this chingchangwang loser

>>16137329
This faggot is a pedokike sympathizer and apologist. He attended an inbred pedokike child molestation ritual, he gets the rope.

>>16137349
lol it is going to happen. That's one of the most popular applications of machine learning. Uber is investing a metric ton of its money into research on it along with FAANG and the 5G generation is when it will hit its stride.

The real distinction is routine vs. non-routine. Routine jobs of all stripes are those most under threat from AI and automation, and in time more categories of jobs will be affected. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, wealth advisors, traders, journalists, and even artists and psychologists who perform routine activities will be threatened by automation technologies.

There is a lot of repetitive functioning in what we consider high-end professional jobs—what I call intellectual manual labor. A doctor, lawyer, accountant, dentist, or pharmacist will go through years of training and then do the same thing over and over again in slightly different variations.

The Federal Reserve categorizes about 62 million jobs as routine—or approximately 44 percent of total jobs. The Fed calls the disappearance of these middle-skill jobs “job polarization,” meaning we will be left with low-end service jobs and high-end cognitive jobs and very little in between. This trend goes hand-in-hand with the disappearance of the American middle class and the startlingly high income inequality in the United States.

It’s hard to understand what exponential growth means over time. Take the example of a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle’s efficiency. If it had advanced according to Moore’s Law, the vehicle, in 2015, would be able to go 300,000 miles per hour and get two million miles per gallon of gas. That’s what’s happening with computers.

>>16137355
Dude, $1K will cover your rent and utilities with not much left over. And that's if you live in an inexpensive neighborhood or are living with a bunch of roommates. You still need to work if you want to enjoy the finer things in life (aka next best iPhone, next best iPad,etc etc).

>>16137517
you must not grasp how far people are willing to go so they don’t have to work

>>16137329
I fully agree with Yang's assessment of the situation. The situation is dire, and could very well lead to large scale social instability, revolution, riots and Martial Law, even in the West.
But I don't necessarily believe that UBI will solve anything. It may very well just fuck the situation up even more. Working is extremely important for mental health. People want to achieve things, feel useful, feel self-reliant, and socialize with others. If we remove people from the workforce through UBI, then we will obviously get even more shut-ins, even more young males playing video games all day in stead of working/having families, etc.
Honestly, as dumb as it sounds, I think the answer may very well be to expand the government, and give everyone completely useless jobs. But the government obviously needs to pretend that the jobs are important and meaningful, so that people will enjoy having them, and enjoy receiving their paycheck in stead of some UBI.
This is equally inefficient obviously, but at least it won't have the disastrous effects that removing people from the workforce would have.
>>16137541
>you must not grasp how far people are willing to go so they don’t have to work
This. And this is not only the case for unskilled workers, immigrants or people with shitty job prospects. I think quite a lot of people with excellent jobs or job prospects will be perfectly happy to get 1k/month in stead of working and getting 5k+ per month.That's just my opinion, and my observations from Norway, where we have a bunch of people, of all races/ages/genders who choose not to work because the benefits for not working are so vast

Eliminate government and end taxes with the automation

>>16137889
>expand the government, and give everyone completely useless jobs.
no thanks comrade

there's no evidence that UBI will decrease labor force participation significantly. they only found some new mothers and people going back to school dropped out.

>>16137355
please tell us a better idea than UBI. elon himself has says he thinks UBI is inevitable not because he wants it, but because he doesn't see any other realistic option.

People's data will be their income stream. The crypto encryption (dna) will allow people to profit off their own dna.

>>16137959
>no thanks comrade
I'm assuming you mean comrade as a reference to soviets/communism.
If so, how is giving people money through UBI any less communistic than giving people money for performing a useless job? As far as I can tell, they are identical, but the jobs at least provide people with a social arena and opportunity to feel like they contribute.
>there's no evidence that UBI will decrease labor force participation significantly.
Fucking lol. It's obvious that less people will choose to work when they no longer need to. The research on UBI is extremely limited, so to ignore the possibility of lower work force participation because some meme study conducted with like 12 people in Finland said otherwise is extremely ill-advised. Not to mention that Finland is an extremely homogeneous society with an extremely strong sense of pride, community and tradition, completely unlike the USA where Frank Yang intends to implement UBI.
But again, I am not entirely pessimistic on UBI, and I certainly see the need for some kind of remedy to this looming problem.

>>16137329
>muh UBI
heres a radical idea: how about lowering taxes instead of moving even more money from one pocket to the other

>>16137329
>he doesn't understand basic economics
>he wants to entrust a central authority to make his and everyone else's life decisions, even moreso than what is already the case
freedom of disassociation or death, faggot
fuck yang, fuck collapsitarians who wanna demolish the system with wealth-producing individuals still forcibly tied to it, fuck liberals, fuck neocons, fuck yubee niggors who think that useless heroin shitheads getting EVEN CLOSER, considering minimum wage is and will still be a thing, to having the same income as actual working people is both a good and morally-conscious idea and an inescapable inevitability, and fuck collectivism as a whole
sage grows with vigor in the options field
pic unrelated

>>16138138
His UBI is funded through a value added tax on Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, not you.

>>16137889
People derive fulfillment from careers, not jobs. Nobody gets a sense of purpose out of working in retail or food preparation, two of the most common jobs on Earth, they do them because they have to in order to teeter between the second and third tier on Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

"Don't give me $1000 because people who do not work will continue not to work."

>>16137959
This. UBI is inevitable, and if you're in favor of the government instead mandating everyone get a useless government job, kys

>>16138295
>His UBI is funded through a value added tax on Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, not you.
who do you think is gonna pay for that tax? lmao the absolute state of biz

>>16137959
UBI in some form is probably inevitable, yes. But we’re not quite in a place where it makes sense to implement one. Give it a couple decades and we’ll talk

>>16137355
>pay over $1000 in taxes each month to inefficient federal programs
>somehow think getting that money back from those programs is welfare
You're an idiot. Yang's Freedom Dividend is libertarian concept couched in Democratic welfare language to make "tax cut" palatable to the people he needs on board for the whole program. Stop conflating this with the retarded bogeyman of blacks getting money for nothing and realize that without Yang, black or white, you're in the same fucking boat. Race was and still is just a spook that kept useful idiots like you fighting over delusions of supremacy while the actually important politics plays out unnoticed by you retarded plebs.

>>16138357
>he thinks the current economic order can survive 20 more years of this shitshow
Cute

>>16138295
>Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Pseudoscientific shit which loses all of its credibility simply by trying to declare subjective desires such as shallow sex a need (or is used to push such), while much more important things, such as morals, are completely ignored. Whereas, you guessed it, morals are part of why you would have a happy and fulfilling life (abstaining monks are extremely happy). Yet... morals and sex being a need might even conflict as such. I'm deeply sorry for the state of your mentally challenged and increasingly depressed society. Try again without a capitalist system in which philosophies are promoted only because there are multi-billion lobbies behind it.

>>16138356
They pay the tax at every single step of the way. A portion of that will get passed on to the price of the luxury items that aren't exempt. To come out in the negative on this a consumer would need to spend around 120k per year on luxury items. Anyone in that position will wipe their ass with the financial impact of the VAT.

>>16138295
>amazon google and microsoft are taxed
>companies shift burden of tax onto consumers
>you end up paying a tax on the money you receive via increased prices on the companies being taxed

is this babbys first intro into economics?

>>16138404
Wow you are dumb, denying sex is a basic human need. Monks living a life of abstinence is an extreme exception to the rule

>>16137329
>83 percent of jobs where people make less than $20 per hour will be subject to automation or replacement

This is utter bullshit.

Look at CA for example, they're passing laws that basically destroy the business models of companies like Uber etc.

CA Politicians will do everything in their power to make sure redundant, necessary jobs exist.

>>16138404
The physiological need for reproduction is not the same as intimacy.

>>16138419
You forgot the part where $1000/mo easily pays for any increases in price and still leaves something like $990 a month afterwards.

>>16138369
it can and will, even if the proles end up getting steamrolled in the process. Have a more realistic timeline or blow your load early and get nothing, up to you

>>16138472
K, well if you're quibbling over timelines, then you basically admitted ubi is good and you lost the argument anyway.

>>16138494
I already know UBI will one day be good, I also know your reading comprehension is a good as your understanding of policy and the economy

>>16137329
Yang is growing on me rs rs

>>16138505
>I already know UBI will one day be good

lol

"look at me, I'm an ignorant, spoiled white kid!"

>>16138522
you are a child

>>16137329
Faggot cried about border spics, what a loser

>>16138365
Holy based

>>16138526
You think like one

>>16137491
Not in our lifetime, machine learning isn't enough to reach autonomous vehicles, it's glorified calculus and statistics, clever math but wayyyy overhyped. Heres an article: https://amp-economist-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/amp.economist.com/leaders/2019/10/10/driverless-cars-are-stuck-in-a-jam

>>16137517
Yeah, right now. Once everybody has an extra $1k to spend prices will shoot up and they'll have to increase the amount they give people constantly until hyperinflation kicks in.

>>16137355
>giving people free money just turns them into niggers.

It's how the white Democrats keep your American niggers on a leash... your niggers really need to "get woke" & realize they're being played

>>16138537
at least I’m capable of articulating a position instead of being mindlessly aggressive

>>16137355
I used to think like this not because of your retarded logic but because of rampant inflation. And then I thought about and found that unlike trickle down economics, it will actually benefit the middle class and those seeking to get there. More trickle down economics will only inflate asset prices. UBI will also, but not nearly as much as it will inflate simple goods and services. Most importantly it will reallocate welfare dollars to those of us producing and bearing the bulk of the tax burden.

I don't mind funding neets as long as their income gets tacked onto mine. And unlike social security, I will actually realize the benefits of UBI in my lifetime.

I'm all for it. And if Trump wasn't running for reelection, Yang would have my vote.

Actually 1000 a month is pretty smart for multiple reasons..

1. it can replace some welfare, and in a way force some people to spend their money on necessities, by cutting welfare they used to buy drugs and luxuries.
2. poor people spend money they get, investing it back into the economy.
3. Big data is already using out information to make billions, basically they Should be paying us.
4. Obviously automation is going to wipe people out in the job force.
5. general health and mental health will improve.

>>16137489
These idiots think we will have Bender- like robots to do everything in 5 years. Yang Gangers belong in mental hospitals

>>16138324
You get the rope commie

>>16138526
Shut the fuck up beta go get a job you worthless piece of shit. Oh and have sex comrade

>>16137329
Reminder than Yangdrones plan 4chan raids on their subreddit

>>16139106
feels good triggering yangcucks and spastic retards at the same time

>>16138553
Tesla is already fully capable of self driving. The only thing that is really stopping adoption of it at this point are regulations:
https://youtu.be/tlThdr3O5Qo

>>16137355
You are a retard

>>16138365
>Freedom Dividend is libertarian concept
>Only in that it was a preferable alternative to our current welfare system.

>>16139424
Libertarians need to fuck off already. Your ideology is cancer and enables liberals to win because they use you as a strawman for all right wingers. Kys

>>16139447
political opposition is all about attacking strawmen dummy, imaginary neonazis and psycho Christians are the leftist strawmen of choice, not edgy ancaps

>>16139424
What I hate most about Yang is that he's so close to the right answer but still so fucking retarded. He always brings up the Alaska Permanent Fund, which is a policy I agree with, but instead of following this model, he advocates for more taxes on production.

The APF is the model we need to follow in order to elminate unconsittuional taxes on labor and capital which reduce us to taxcows. Natural resources are the only morally defnesible basis for taxation. They should be bid off on the free market and the revenue should be distrubted to its rightful owners, so that the market determines the highest and best use but people aren't denied the benefit of what's rightfully theirs. In that way, we can fund (hopefully small) public spending and return profits to people, without putting stifling taxes on production or levying inefficient income taxes.

Fuck Yang.

>>16139502
how do you envision a plan like Alaska’s working as we transition toward mineral wealth being the only resource of value

>>16139424
>freedom dividend
>it's called the freedom dividend
Holy shit, Americans are literal living memes.

>>16139502
Every other western country has a VAT. Yang proposing a small VAT is not only reasonable and doable (unlike you're retarded idea), it's necessary to stop Americans from being cucked by big businesses.

>>16137329
Shut the fuck up you are Organized Dissonance by the fucking Jewish kike bastards to demoralize us

>>16138157
Based

Let's be honest, the whole bottom class is made up of genetic mutants birthed with technology without which they would have died in child birth, are feed and clothed by a unsustainable welfare system without which they would perish during a mild winter, and are heroically treated with medicine created and funded by their betters, without which they would gracelessly expire from being a fat, disgusting slug, only ever a burden on society.

>>16139639
they are a useful transactional medium facilitating the distribution of capital among the entities managing their support system. these people don’t save money, they take on debt which becomes revenue for companies to reinvest elsewhere. their aesthetic is certainly dismal and shouldn’t be glamorized, but their existence is not entirely without purpose so far as corporations are concerned. The welfare system in effect serves as a subsidy for business

>>16137329
crypto would literally shoot up if he were to be elected, too bad americans are too dumb to understand his policies