Depends on what they could get in exchange for their wages. For instance, we could double the amount of money in circulation and wages would double but so would prices. Better question: Would people rather get more/better stuff without exerting any more effort? Of course, everyone would. So if a person is marooned on an island and wanted more/better stuff without exerting any more effort, what would you suggest he do? Work smarter, maybe?

To achieve that "affluence" you will have a much higher proportion of households with two people working and a much much much higher degree of consumer debt and job insecurity.

Houses also cost a much smaller %multiple of average wage. So you could buy a bigger house for a smaller relative mortgage exposure.

Its almost like people who got to work through the 60s, 70s and 80s are not renowned for having a much easier ride than current generations. Baby Boomers for the win.

Its no way as clear cut as the we got iphones brigade like to claim.

2 reasons why your quote is misleading:

Go poll 100 middle class people and ask what they made 30 years ago and what they make now. Find 1 or more people whose income was flat over that time frame and I will tell you why that is an absurd argument.

Go back in time to 1970 and make your purchases with one years of a middle class income and then do the same today and see if you really have the same stuff. What is one of the main reasons today's stuff is so much better? Because there is a huge incentive for people to invent stuff and make other stuff better... aka inequality.

O.A.F.K.1.1: The bottom line is if people want more they can work longer, harder or smarter, or alternatively, get a larger share of what’s produced from those who are. And look, I’m not discounting the effects of rent-seeking, monopsonization of labor, gaming the system, blatant corruption, etc. But even if we were to somehow get rid of all that, those underlying dynamics will still be in effect and the people who are working smarter will continue to pull away economically from those who don’t simply due to the amplifying effect exponentially increasing technology has on productivity. So at the end of the day, since we’re somewhat maxed-out on working longer and harder, we still need to teach people to work smarter if we’re genuinely interested in helping the poor do better economically.

Like about half of federal spending is on Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, and Social Security. Throw in the Department of Education spending as well as the other category (read the footnote) and it is over 50%. The federal spending on these entitlements today is much greater than spending on them in the 70s. Then we have the increases in federal spending on education from the 70s. I don’t know but maybe this should be considered as a redistribution.

I’m simply talking about shifting the distribution in real wage gains such that the wealthiest realized smaller gains and everyone else realized greater. I’m not sure why that would require doubling the amount of money in circulation? But I’ll readily admit I could be missing something, I’m not an expert in economics.

I don’t think it’s misleading at all. It talking about growing inequality, not the fact that inequality exists. Clearly there was inequality back then and plenty of people decided to invent stuff and improve things, if anything that’s an argument for redistribution to keep the margin of inequality lower.

It's less about things being automated than the transition to automation.

If houses are prefabricated and materials are gathered with a tiny number of people manning/repairing machines, the market price for houses plummets and the price becomes almost entirely a function of land (which is hardly scarce). If food is harvested in large scale farms that require no labor the cost of food becomes negligible.

The problem is when people who've spent x years specializing in some skill that becomes obsolete are still in a position where they have to buy things for which the production hasn't been automated.



When we reach the end game i think contrary to the case a lot of people are making, opportunities will be more oriented towards low skill service jobs and trades people than it will be high info technical jobs. Something like CS and engineering scale much easier than do plumbers and electricians.

We'll still have a problem in trying to make sure people apply their productive efforts in ways that make sense, but i think the solution to that lies in some pretty simple changes in public policy. The min wage is kind of like an exaggerated roadblock on labor engagement to what would normally happen under a free market scenario where people with skills/knowledge have little incentive to train someone in an apprenticeship like relationship. I've seen how this plays out in a variety of industries where because people apprenticing can basically go off on their own after a year, it's often not worth it for already established people to take on new hires even if the wage is zero.

I think the way around this is to have workers and employers tethered, where a portion of income tax paid by the employee is repatriated to the employer going forward for some fixed period of time. Because the employers are internalizing some of the benefits of employees acquiring the skills they won't be as hesitant to train people.

˄ Fortunately we're not short on ideas, especially in regard to implementing apprenticeship programs:

Ready to Work: Job-Driven Training and American Opportunity

Career and Technical Education: Five Ways That Pay Along the Way to the B.A.

That report is more aspirational than practical.

It's not a bad thing to have more programs that cater to those needs but the transition from classroom to job presents problems when there's a learning curve starting off. The wage you'd have to pay for it to be worth your while is often less than min wage. I can give several examples of this if you'd like. You're basically paying them to train them, giving them marketable skills without any level of commitment or indebtedness.

In conventional apprenticeships you need to work under someone for a fixed number of years ensuring some return on the employers investment. it's not practical to apply that to all possible vocations/skills though.

The system does work as is it's just not working as well as it would if incentives to train people was closer to proportional to the value of the skills they're acquiring.

The same could be said for schools. Imagine if universities were compensated in part based on the earning potential of their graduates instead of just marginally benefiting from beefing up their employment statistics on brochures. It wouldn't be to the exclusion of core academic curriculum and they'd still offer programs that aren't geared towards jobs; those programs would just be priced at something closer to cost, whereas for STEM students the schools would be competing on price to try and attract motivated people. For programs that are slam dunks to lead to high paying jobs you'd probably have most people in the program getting paid by the school based on their academic performance.

I can see that working with a future employment contract in exchange for apprenticeship training but I can’t see any practical ways to “tether” future earnings to training. But maybe I'm missing something.

You use your gov id when you register for these programs. You use your gov id when you file your taxes. Where's the disconnect?

The price of schooling then becomes inversely related to the earning potential it's adding. If they expect you to make a lot upon completion, schools will compete on price to the point that they'd want to pay people to take some of the programs.

Alternatively if the programs lead to low paying crap jobs where some grads even prefer not to work after completion, the price tag is going to basically be basically the full sticker price that it is now.

What if a former apprentice of company A ends up getting a good paying job with company B but claims his apprenticeship training with company A was worthless or subpar and didn’t really contribute to his current earnings?

I get what you’re saying but all you’re doing is shifting the risk burden from the employer to the apprentice, which isn’t much different than what’s going on with our higher education system when the government guarantees student loans. The problem is almost half of college grads end up underemployed because colleges have no risk and plenty of reward for turning out essentially unemployable grads. So whether through guaranteeing college loans, guaranteeing an employer will be reimbursed for apprenticeship training or even guaranteeing subpar mortgages, the end result is always the same when the government steps in and mitigates risk—a big fat debt bubble.

They all do.

There's a diminishing scale based on how many years removed you are from the program/apprenticeship/employment. It doesn't last indefinitely.

If you go for an apprenticeship at company/school A and are unable to work for 3-4 years following / forced to go to school/company B... the first company/school will have surrendered the bulk of what they'd have been entitled to.

It's a little bit more difficult with fields that are research intensive or require significant, multi tiered commitments to education or training where the wage immediately after graduated is a small component of the value being created, but this ends up being integrated into future educational/employment - because graduates of undergrad programs in fields that will later on lead to things that are highly valued will also each be competing to have graduates attend their school or work for them.

So for instance, if graduate schools see someone with a bachelors in biology as likely to acquire a high paying job or to do high value research upon completion of their program, they'll be obliged to pay them to study at the graduate level, which would then in part passed onto the provider of undergraduate level education.

At all junctures it increases the connection between value being created and monetary gain by the parties responsible for creating the value.


No, it's quite the opposite. There's significantly less of a risk/burden to the student/apprentice/employee, because in all cases where they're applying their productive efforts, they have an added surety that the person providing it is just as incentivized as they are to create desirable outcomes.

The problem now is that the schools have very little reason to care, and so their focus becomes less about creating value than it is about convincing people that they're creating value, which allows them to charge a high sticker price.

My framework provides no guarantee that the school/employer will be compensated. It's contingent on whether they accomplish what they're claiming they do. In cases where they fail, they're the ones primarily eating the cost. When a government guarantees the loan it's irrelevant to the school as to whether the student has a monetarily desirable outcome, which is why they're still so happy to take the money of people who will in no way benefit from the program.

I've looked at so many graduate programs that make lofty claims, and when you pick it apart, it's blatantly obvious that they're manipulating the numbers to cash in on peoples naivety.

They produce grad stats for instance that conveniently (and without mention) omit people who did not find employment after graduation. They skirt the fact that a lot of the people got jobs that had nothing to do with their education. And then they trot out one of a small number of graduates who did get to work in the field, who's making only slightly more than they otherwise would have, to sweet talk people into forking out 10s of thousands of dollars for something most of them will regret. And a lot of the professors clearly know it, but they don't say anything because it would jeopardize their job.

Unfortunately you can't have teams of people independently evaluating every employment claim made by a school. What you can do is tie their compensation to their success in accomplishing their stated goals.

It won't stop people from overpaying for bad educational products, but it makes it a lot harder. And i'd expect that this would make educational loans obsolete since a schools unwillingness to heavily subsidize a program should be taken as a clear sign that they have no confidence in what the students will get out of it.

Believing that we're going to retrain our way out of this is super fanciful. We've already seen millions of manufacturing jobs automated away, and the vast majority of those workers never recovered economically. There is no reason to think that retail workers, call center workers, or drivers will ever recover once their jobs disappear.

This time is fundamentally different unfortunately. A lot of the people ITT's plan is to do basically nothing and you're sharing blatant propaganda as sources.

Most of the people in this thread are going to be fine. We've mostly got good jobs that are highly resistant to automation. Heck I make a decent chunk of my pay by handling transportation for various kinds of automation equipment. Me and the guys who install said equipment are going to be fine. That makes it pretty easy to overlook the whole situation and pretend like it isn't happening.

IRL Japan has already shown that you can very nearly fully automate retail and restaurants. AI is going to make call center workers obsolete. Automated trucks are going to start taking jobs from CDL drivers in ~5 years at some level and eliminate them completely in <15.

Given the fact that retraining didn't work for manufacturing workers, who were above average in terms of their skills, motivation, and available funds to retrain, why would we expect people who currently make <15 bucks an hour in retail and restaurants to magically do better?

there's also an additional usually overlooked issue which is that we're adjusting working practices to fit in with automation. This is accelerating the problem.

Fruit picking is going to be a huge area of automation in the next decade or so and not only will farms be reorganised to facilitate that automation but awkward fruits will get significantly replaced with crops that are easier to automate.

We're probably moving away from open air farming in a pretty big way over the next 30-40 years honestly. It creates a ton of pollution (which we're going to care more and more about as climate change continues to extract value in increasingly obvious ways) and wastes a lot of product. Fully automated greenhouses exist now, and that technology will get steadily cheaper.

Honestly though agriculture has already been heavily automated. Look at any modern American farm planting commodity crops and you'll find that the number of actual people employed in farming is quite low.

Dateline 1810: Economists predict 75% unemployment and massive famine in 200 years due to technology taking our jobs!

What I'm suggesting is completely agnostic as to whether you'd want to do other things.

But I think you're underestimating how much this incentive-chasm is responsible for peoples inability to get on track to doing jobs that will pay well.

At every level of every corporate structure you have this dilemma where there's a deluge of people who would be eager to take on very low paying (or even unapid) jobs for things that through hard work would lead to high paying jobs, but because employers have no way of guarantee capturing the value they're creating by training them, they have little reason to do it. This is why employers frown on people who hop between companies looking for better offers. You want to be seen as loyal, but not actually BE loyal, and they know it, so they just tend to be very parsimonious in the amount they invest in training more generally.

How much time and effort would YOU allocate to training someone to do what you do, knowing that once they're proficient they can just peace out and become a competitor?

This doesn't make more jobs magically appear, but it does close the earnings gap significantly by incentivizing people to work towards things that are highly valued.

Sorry, I meant to to say - by incentivizing people to train others to do things that are highly valued.

massive famine? Why is this about any famine? The reverse is far more likely.

Worth also looking at the collapse in agriculture jobs that has occurred. Graph might be off but if it is it's only going to be by a decade or so.

I was particularly thinking about fruit picking as the example but the same is true everywhere. Were' rushing to change processes to facilitate automation as well as extending the abilities of automation.

Because some itt believe that robots are going to take most of our jobs and apparently continue to produce the goods that we won't be be able to buy (since we no longer have jobs) resulting in most everyone being starved for goods.