Jophiel wrote:
Back to my initial comment, we've gotten bogged down in manufacturing but once upon a time the idea was for technology in general to lighten our burden. For a white collar example, your office may have one person doing accounts receivable, one person doing payroll and another answering phones, each a 40hr task. Then you bring in a computer and AR and payroll now take 15 hours each. Under the old dream, the idea was that your payroll person would now work a 15 hour week, completing their task and being able to enjoy the other 25 hours while still receiving a full wage for their job.
No one, other than maybe some really nutty socialists in Sweden or something, thought that this would happen, much less that this is the "dream" we should strive for. What a ridiculous false assumption.
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Instead, of course, what happens is that the payroll person and the receptionist get fired and the Accounts Receivable person is told that they need to do AR, payroll and answer the phones while only receiving a nominal, if any, increase in pay. They are not being paid for their task but rather for the week and their week must be filled with productivity to warrant a check. Certainly there is an increase in productivity -- you now have one person doing the work of three for the wages of one -- but the remaining employees barely benefit if at all and the discarded employees of course are out of a job. Twenty years later and the company has outsourced its payroll and AR needs to a company in India for 50% of the wages of the remaining worker.
Except that's not what happens. What actually happens is that the company can now do more work with the same number of people, which increases profits, which allows the company to expand, thus not only retaining the employees they already had, but hiring new ones as well (since process improvements as new technology are adopted tend to cross multiple types of jobs). Your assumed course of action relies on companies making the oft-repeated claim by the left of "having enough", and stopping. That doesn't happen. They expand. They make more products and hire more people.
Yes, in the short term, there are layoffs. But those process improvements don't just occur in one place. They occur industry wide. So now, operating expenses for business have decreased because instead of having to hire 3 people just to handle the overhead of payroll, accounts, and phones, you can do this with one. Making new start ups cheaper and more plentiful. Which means that even those laid off find new jobs. And assuming they maintain their skills with the new technology, will be in demand.
Remember also, that these process improvements tend to be gradual. It's not like one day everyone gets replaced by a computer or a robot. It happens over time, and over that same time the market has an amazing tendency to adjust and find ways to utilize this new and more productive labor force. And these same improvements drive up the quantity and quality of goods, while driving down the prices, providing consumers with more options to buy, while maintaining sufficient earnings for them to afford it.
This is how economies work. If this process didn't work, then we should have like 90% unemployment right now. But we don't.
It's just interesting to me that there's this strange but recurring idea that if we just automate "enough" and improve processes "enough", we'll reach a point where profit margins on labor are so high that we can just utilize a tiny fraction of the population actually working at the few jobs that are needed, while everyone else is supported via taxation of those excess profits, and we'll all live in a utopian dream. But that's not how things actually work. What happens is that as process improvements occur, it actually increases the demand for the recently freed up labor, since the potential value of an hours work has now increased. This tends to "solve" the idle labor problem. And it does so far more than trying to just provide the excess population with free lives off the super efficient minority who still work (which, as a model is incredibly problematic).
I get that liberals want that "dream" to happen. And, in typical "cart before the horse" fashion, push for a social service infrastructure to make it happen. But that's all well in advance of actual need (and somewhat self creating). In the real world, increased profits drive increased growth, which drives increased employment. Companies aren't looking for ways to use process improvements to drive down labor costs, but looking for ways to utilize the higher efficiency worker. Getting caught up in the wash along the way will cause you to fail to see the bigger picture here. And that bigger picture is that this process makes our lives much much better over time. And those in the business side of this, actually want to hire people and gain profit from their labor. That the specific form of that labor changes over time isn't really an issue. Not many wagon wheel makers today. Also, not a whole lot of people manually bolting parts onto cars either. Yet, somehow, we manage to find jobs for those people to do.