Great article, and a topic much discussed in my family and friends social group. The situation will get worse, with some of us having it easy while more and more people are falling through the cracks.
For the shamefull people who have little empathy for people who more of less have done the right things in their lives but struggle anyway, I say to you: congratulations for becoming corporate shills or shills for the elite.
I especially liked the last paragraph in the article about lending a hand.
So although obviously there's an issue here, perhaps the issue lies in society's lack of evolution to recognize the facts about our educational system's value addition?
I don't think it's solely a matter of the educational system. There is an issue of availability and discoverability of careers (and more generally, lifestyles) where one can be "successful". Certainly, the educational system could fill this role, but it can add substantial value without doing so.
The article claims 9% of CS majors are unemployed, but the article they reference (http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2013/07/...) actually states that 9% of recently graduated CS majors are unemployed. The USA Today article referred to was written in July and does not specify what they mean by "recently graduated." In any case, amazingly bad fact checking on the part of Al Jazeera.
Explanation and analysis of the idea of a 'post-employment economy', i.e. increasing corporate profits and decreasing employment, is given in 'The Lights in the Tunnel' by Martin Ford (which I found to be a good read, although a little verbose).
The main argument is that cheap computerized automation is displacing human workers, and corporate incentives are such that the trend is likely to continue. The long-term problem is that if systemic unemployment grows then the economy as a whole starts to flag b/c consumers no longer have the funds to drive the consumer economy.
His solution is rethinking corporate tax (reducing/eliminating pay-roll taxes which discentivize hiring, and potentially increasing corporate revenue tax). If displacement becomes extreme, he suggests that corporate taxes could fund a basic income for displaced workers to prop up the consumer economy.
I'm extremely pessimistic about any proposed solution that involves politics (changes to the tax code, basic income, etc), especially in the US. The populace at large doesn't have the interest or imagination to consider changing the game like that, and there's too much money mixed into the political system and the mass media to allow game changing ideas to enter the mainstream. (When I say "the game" I mean the political and economic system we've accreted, with its associated ideas about things like property and ownership.)
The only path out of this situation that I've ever been able to imagine that doesn't involve a swift, massive shift in popular consciousness is a gradual transition to worker control of capital. In other words, entrepreneurs found and grow worker cooperatives (a la Mondragon Corporation) that provide their services and/or goods preferentially to other cooperatives.
The pieces are out there to start doing this. There aren't any real legal obstacles to growing a new system inside the one we have now. For example, you can find pre-written C-corp bylaws online that spell out how a worker co-op functions and the ways it's protected from co-option by non-cooperative entities. It's just a matter of convincing individual entrepreneurs that it's not only a viable option but actually a socially positive (perhaps even necessary, in the long term) thing to do.
That's understandably a hard sell in the modern startup world where seemingly everyone is dreaming of astronomical wealth and willing to sacrifice every aspect of their life in its pursuit, but it should be easier to change a few key minds one at a time than to convince greater than 50% of the voting public that drastic changes need to be made.
I agree that currently the populace at large might not understand what is going on, but if structural employment continues to grow, then I think the nature of the problem will become more clear. In the limit, if the percentage of displaced workers becomes sufficiently large (>50%), then something like basic income seems to become politically tractable.
I do like the idea of worker cooperatives and do not know enough about them to understand if they are a realistic or preferable option to changing governmental policy. Do you have any good references related to the idea of cooperatives giving preferential treatment to other cooperatives?
By the way, here [1] is a very good resource on cooperatives in general. Don't be put off by the title (The Cooperative Solution: How the United States can tame recessions, reduce
inequality, and protect the environment) -- it's primarily history along with a survey of the cooperative economy circa 2012.
In general, the idea comes out of the Rochdale Principles [1], which most co-ops use as a sort of guide. The specific idea of giving preferential treatment to other cooperatives as clients/customers -- I don't know, that may have just popped into my head. But it seems like good strategy.
I don't see how this would solve the issue. The main problem is that we got too efficient. We make too many goods per capita. There's no enough work to employ everybody
Transitioning to cooperatives wouldn't fix that - we'd still have overproduction that would limit number of cooperatives and how many people they employ. More equal distribution of wealth may increase consumption a weee bit. But the core problem wouldn't go away.
I think you're saying that the core problem we face is that productivity per capita has gotten too high. One cause of increased productivity is that businesses are incentivized to compress their workforce as much as possible because labor is treated as just another input/cost. Viewed through that lens, an enterprise like a cooperative that actively tries to maintain its workforce is in effect holding productivity (per worker) in check, directly addressing the problem.
(That may put cooperatives at an inherent competitive disadvantage in the market. I haven't thought or read enough about that to have a strong outlook. But my gut response is that the challenge of providing a livelihood for your worker-owners is very similar to the challenge of providing a return to investors, and aside from an inability to perform layoffs, a cooperative is free to confront that challenge in the same way as any other business.)
Another way to look at it is that the benefits of technological advances would accrue to the worker-owners rather than the investors. So when their jobs get replaced by robots, the worker-owners just work less and share the profit from the robot labor, whereas in an investor-owned enterprise, all the employees are laid off and the investors share the profit. (And eventually there are no consumers for the product of the robots' labor because there's universal unemployment and investor capital is concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority, so you have to institute radical redistribution just to be able to continue to have any economy at all.)
Of course, the cooperative needs to have enough capital to actually acquire some robots when the time comes, so best start accumulating that capital ASAP.
I'd like to see this combined with GPL/Creative-Commons style infectivity. Some sort of charter that makes coops prefer buying from or selling to other coops, charge non-coops more for their services, etc.
Put it this way, the money taken out of the system when mortgages blew up did not just accumulate over night.
But its the multiplying effect that is the Big thing that was taken away...that multiplying effect did in fact trickle down to USA job growth for the middle class.
Now we do not have it..
Its different than other economy transitions, in other transitions for example from farm to industrial you had higher industrial wage jobs spurring young farmers to move to the city to work. Now we have what?
We may be looking at a 0-n problem being solved in that does a 'StatUp' economy get established..
The one saving grace about automation is that there
Is rarely enough time to automate everything. The automation software will need to be tweaked to manage the infinite variability of the future.
I think getting rid of, or reducing payroll, tax is a good idea in the medium term though.
If you have a CS degree and you live in Silicon Valley changes are pretty much that you're one of the best educated people, in the richest country in the world at the place with one of the hottest economies of the moment. I would bet that you had to work really hard to be unemployable.
I would bet that a lot of people with CS degrees in Greece, Portugal or Spain have a very different story to tell.
People with CS degrees in other cities and towns in the US also have a different story to tell.
Wealth consolidation is a regional effect, and there are plenty of well-educated, hard-working potential CS engineers who make the wise choice to not risk living in a high cost-of-living environment for the chance to join a startup that is more than 50% likely to fail.
I agree and even within the CS field it can be a very different story. I had no problems getting a traineeships as a programmer (fun and challenging!) but eventually I would like to find a job focused on usability engineering.
It's almost impossible to find a job in that field (unless you have a lot of experience and proven results).
Cant speak for the specifics but thats not what is happening.
What is happening is that the only jobs that are left are either STEM jobs or low paid jobs (Walmart etc)
The middle class is slowly destroyed because it's either been automated away, outsourced or at least can be done with a fraction of the people it used to involve.
Skilled manual labor (mechanics, electricans) are today still in high demand. At least where I live. It's unskilled labor that is disappearing in highly developed countries. I guess to a certain extent you can group skilled mmechanics with STEM....
Unskilled is still in high demand here. Just checked my local craigslist, there were 145 jobs posted this morning looking for landscape general labor, no experience needed, all paying $14-22/hr.
But you should look at this as a trend not the status quo. So for instance 3D printers that prints houses and thus reduces the need for construction people
There does seem to be some hollowing out of the bottom end of IT work. There were people in 2002 making decent livings doing basic PC repair and low end web dev (frontpage etc).
That's been replaced by basic mobile repair shops and low end app dev here. Friend of mine who used to do PC repair runs a little mall kiosk selling phones, accessories, repairing screens and updating roms. He already expanded to 5 F/T employees and another kiosk.
The linked article http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2013/07/... is from last July. It mentions that recent CS grads had an unemployment rate of <9%. Recent drama and theater grads were only at 6%. This seems to be a new phenomenon, within the past year or so.
Same, just looking at the job listings in my city there are hundreds of open CS related jobs. Some pretty interesting too, one company hiring for Scheme/Lisp hackers who want to make their own DSL's.
I recall a testimony that reported #3 verbatim (heard on the radio, by the victim herself). Luckily, no one said that to my face. I made #4 up, on the assumption that the "real world" means money is involved. (That last one is often use to depreciate CS research: somehow, it's often not the "real world".)
Now, just a little problem: If I'm not going to get hired, how am I supposed to get any practical experience? Looks like an egg & chicken situation to me. Don't tell me Open Source is the only escape, is it?
I'm really glad I was hired back when I had next to no practical experience.
It doesn't necessarily need to be told what to do by a human. If you can create an AI capable of doing it and a process which can be automated, then I believe it's possible.
I'm not saying it would be easy, but automating the complexity of rug weaving was once thought to be impossible too. The past suggests that with enough knowledge and infrastructure any human endeavor can be automated. Until recently, technology has mostly allowed replicating physical labor, but now we've made tenuous steps in virtualizing the processes of the human mind.
I think you still need to tell the AI, with some measure of detail, what he needs to build for you. I posit that that act is called programming by definition. Perhaps the difference between today's high-level languages, and the original way programmers programmed their machines in the fifties, is almost as vast as the difference we perceive between programming and telling our AI what to build.
I guess what I'm saying is, we'll be the last jobs to be eliminated by progress, perhaps excepting the two oldest professions in the world (prostitutes & politicians).
A great deal of programming is "maintenance work"---finding clever ways to automate data transactions, configurations, or physical migrations that could in theory be automated (i.e. describing what I want to do is straightforward such as "I want to move all the data from Duluth to Kookamunga") but for various reasons has not yet been (happens too infrequently to justify the cost, has too many 'sharp edges' in terms of unexpected scenarios, data is too sensitive to trust it to an automated process).
A combination of software-as-a-service and ever-better automation tools will start to erode the number of programmers needed for those sort of roles. In fact, there's an old saw about a good software engineer being one who codes themselves out of a job. ;)
I think operating the hypothetical Nth generation high-level tools for the tasks you describe (let's call it ETL?) are still considered programming, as the difference between today's tools and the tool you describe is probably smaller than the difference between the nineteen fifties' tools and today's.
ck425 it looks like your account may be dead now because you posted this 4 times in the parent article. Not sure why it did that, but you may want to contact the admins and see if this is something you need to worry about.
For the shamefull people who have little empathy for people who more of less have done the right things in their lives but struggle anyway, I say to you: congratulations for becoming corporate shills or shills for the elite.
I especially liked the last paragraph in the article about lending a hand.