What’s better - everyone who lost their jobs picks a new career and retrains doing something new that is valued by society, or the government subsidizes unvalued industries that no one wants just so people never experience any pain?
I’m sympathetic that government can help those who lose jobs. My preference is straight-up cash transfers so they can pick their own schools and move to where jobs are, rather than a government-run school loaded with bureaucracy. But artificially preserving shrinking industries just so we can all act like we still need them around is a waste of tax dollars and is logically inconsistent.
You keep downvoting me, but you’ve yet to explain where these jobs are coming from. The jobs Detroit lost didn’t shift, they were just lost forever. The people who held them now work minimum wage jobs or live off welfare. What are the electricians and plumbers doing instead? You can keep saying people will just retrain and do something else but that’s about as useful as Trump saying he’ll bring manufacturing jobs back to the US without any plan. The end result is a lot of nothing.
I’m not downvoting you - on HN you can’t downvote someone you are replying to. It’s the rest of HN that is downvoting your arguments.
Tons of jobs we have now didn’t exist 5, 10, 25 years ago. Every time a mass amount of jobs are lost when an industry collapses, they always say “this time is different!” I just fundamentally disagree with that premise. There will always be work to do and someone willing to pay for it. If that ceases to be the case it would be the first time in human history, which seems way less likely than society continuing on like it has for millennia.
You also seem to think individuals are too stupid to look at the job market, see what skills are in demand, and self-select for learning a skill that they will enjoy and get compensated a fair wage to them. Every single person who loses a job, provided they eventually get off the government dole, will have to find something new to do. Working for a while at a restaurant or warehouse isn’t something they have to do forever. There is just a distinct lack of belief in human agency in your postings.
I think the sentiment you are responding to is the erosion of good jobs. There are tons of new jobs, but for those impacted by this stuff very few of them are good jobs that pay a middle-class income (I know, I don't have a cite, but I'm explaining a sentiment, not a fact - so iono I don't got it).
A contractor in a town where the jobs dried up might work at Lowe's now for example, where they would be kept under 20 hours a week so Lowe's doesn't have to pay benefits, and they could look forward to living in a van off of social security when they retire (source - this is my brother in law at 55 y/o - he has no idea how computers work, and desperately just wants to go back to laying tile like he did for most of his life - lost work - got a job at Lowes a few years back - just laid off actually, due to the virus - he's 100% screwed). There are a lot of these folks floating around, and what has happened to them is absolutely tragic.
Ideally he should re-train in something, but what often winds up happening is that they get sucked into for-profit colleges that encourage them to take out predatory high-interest loans for training that lead to job markets that are either oversaturated, or misrepresented. Then come the payday loans, then come the repossessions.
Ideally those people would just buy a bunch of NoStarch books and become fullstack developers or something, but that's not how people work, unfortunately and we just haven't figured out a good mechanism to help keep those folks on their feet.
The person you're responding to is waaaaaay too angry, and I don't believe you deserve to be on the receiving-end of that, but they may be going through some really rough stuff right now. There's a lot of people who have suddenly found themselves unemployed and homeless and they may very well be in that situation.
So what replaced the jobs in Detroit? You keep saying this but the numbers don't reflect what you're claiming. The middle class in the US is SHRINKING, their wealth is decreasing, and it has been since the 70s. All those jobs are going to other countries or disappearing entirely. You and everyone else on HN can keep parroting the same "it's different jobs" until you're blue in the face, but until you can show me some actual DATA to backup the claim, you're literally just making up a reality that doesn't exist. You're 4 responses in yet without a single citation to back up your claim that there are new jobs to replace the old, and I'm willing to bet if you replied 20 more times you STILL wouldn't have any facts to back anything up you've said. Going from a manufacturing job making $60-80k+/year to driving Uber making minimum wage isn't a "replacement".
> The people who held them now work minimum wage jobs or live off welfare.
You might want to provide a source for that one, there is still a huge amount of car industry expertise there including robotics, electric car engineering and thousands of support companies that feed the main companies.
I have friends who are economists, and I get in this argument with them all the time over beers.
There's economic optimization, and social optimization, and those are two different things that are often totally orthagonal.
Economic progress is often horrendously negative for people's lives and livelihoods. People don't just pick-up and move, or re-train in a completely different field with the fluidity that is often indicated, and disruption often destroys lives. This is why income inequality is getting really worrisome, and there's the huge debate over college education costs, and you see so many people now living in their cars because they're chronically under-employed. This is why Trump was pandering to Pennsylvania coal miners and the like. There are millions and millions of people kind of stuck and not sure how to move forward. Everybody in this country can't just be a fullstack web guy, and the alternatives are increasingly working for minimum wage at two jobs, each of which keeps you under 20 hours so they don't have to pay benefits.
That being said, you can't just put the brakes on progress so that people doing things that we don't need anymore are kept happy.
Ideally, we'd have mechanisms in place to help people transition, but we really don't. The best we have is things like the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, various infrastructure programs (just big employment schemes), and affordable Community College vocational programs. The worst we have are predatory vocational programs that re-train people with useless skills, which are essentially scams to cash in on predatory student loans and GI Bill money.
This is the crux of the 2016 election, and although the virus has hijacked 2020 it probably would have been the crux of that one as well. You have Yang and Sanders proposing massive reforms, AOC with the Green New Deal, contrasted with Trump pushing a regressive approach, and everybody's polarized and yada yada.
Nobody has a good answer yet, or 300 million people wouldn't currently be arguing about it. Ideally we'd have a temporary system of 'engineered inefficiency' in the economy that would help people with legacy skills transition into new fields when employment dried up. But, nobody knows how to politically design, implement, or fund anything like that. So, what we have is this and it sucks.
I hope people smarter than me are working on this problem. I feel horrible about all the folks who have just gotten screwed, and have lost their homes, and are trapped in cycles of poverty. But, I mean, we are debating with strangers on the internet, so you know, no ill will towards anyone even if they disagree.
Very well put! And I agree that our retraining systems are horrendous. I’m probably not anywhere near as reasonable as you, as I can point to the government for every problem - why is college so expensive? Federally backed loans you can’t discharge in bankruptcy. Why do so many jobs need licenses that take years and tens of thousands of dollars to get when, for example, cutting hair is something you can learn on Youtube? Why does starting a billion dollar software company have way less friction and red tape than starting a convenience store? Why is housing so expensive? I can go all day.
Economic freedom leads to personal freedom and increased happiness. The never ending desire to have the government solve all our problems is what got us into this huge mess in the first place. I know that people are hurting, but the solution will emerge.
So, yeah, I'm glad you're a free-market guy because I don't have enough free-market guys to drink beer and argue with. Although I'm not drinking beer (if you are, cheers), and we're not really arguing.
I am curious what the mechanism is from the free-market side to prevent increasing income inequality, and regulatory capture by corporations and the wealthy? If we de-regulate, what stops Bezos and Exxon, EvilCorp, and whoever from doing whatever they want (assume for a second that's not already happening to some extent under the current setup)? I guess that there's a market-based mechanism that is supposed to prevent that, but I don't know enough libertarians to have heard the argument.
I'm not convinced we should legislate our way out of anything either, but I can't get over the idea that deregulation = noone looking over the shoulders of those with absurd amounts of money and the wolf eats the whole damn henhouse.
Yeah, I can’t see how this goes on for much longer without the rise of a new land independent nobility that “employs” everyone else as “contractors” for food, clothing, shelter and very little else. This year amazon has grown enough to “hire” 500 more families in this city. Please put in your family’s application for warehouse attendant now. With the “white collar” jobs becoming like the butlers/valet of yesterday (the privileged servant class).
For a top 5 (or 7) wish list it would be along the line of:
- Outlaw billionaires the same way we’ve outlawed (at least on paper) monopolies. At that scale individuals have the power to sway governments. (A billion is likely not the right number, but it’s a good starting point.)
- Kill the money in politics. Make lobbying illegal.
- Kill the filibuster
- Kill the electoral college
- Decouple healthcare from employment (The only realistic solution I know of is socializing it).
- Provide a robust safety net (but get rid of the checks balances to prevent “abuse”). Just blanket give everyone $2000/month.
- Eliminate exemptions to providing benefits make it proportional to hours worked (worked an average of 10 hours a week for a month? That employer must provide 1 week of benefits to that person.) There is no common good from giving employer a massive expenses break to employ 2 people at 20 hours a week instead of just hiring one full time employee. This is gaming the system plain and simple.
I concede we need the state and am therefore not an anarcho-capitalist. My ideal state is as small as possible and no larger. Military and nuclear weapons are my biggest gotchas that I can’t reason my way around.
So you are asking me the wrong premise - if the state has no power, what regulation can a corporation capture?
I like corporations because businesses provide value. They can fail. The organizing principle has a straight-forwards goal of earning money. I don’t see any states failing (except for socialist ones like Venezuela) in a way that can put them out of business - they tend to grow forever in all directions, capturing more wealth and diminishing freedom.
The next question - do I care about inequality as a given? If everyone on earth had a healthy, purpose driven life but one family had 99.99% of all the wealth, would this be a problem? Basically do we dislike inequality because of envy or because most people genuinely have nothing?
You are correct that corporations are already running the show. Our biggest corporations are more powerful than most countries on earth. Because innovation in free societies is emergent and decentralized, the best the government can do is play whack-a-mole every few years as the free market laps them over and over.
I like the chaos, I like the unpredictability, I like weird people, I like having the freedom to do whatever I want. I want maximum freedom in all things and the least amount of coercion.
One area you should look at if you aren’t familiar is cryptocurrency. This is the most powerful innovation in regards to regaining individual freedom - financial freedom - that has come in centuries. The ability of governments to print their way out of debt is coming to an end, and individuals all over the world are going to have an escape valve from corrupt elites.
This was kind of a rambling response, no beer involved. Cheers
The problem with a state with no power is that it has no ability to prevent organizations from externalizing all of the costs of their profits. A simple place to see this is in environmental regulations. I can give plenty of examples, but before the rise of environmental regulation in the late 20th century, wide swathes of our country were regularly and freely polluted. We fixed lots of that through application of government power and imposed costs on polluters, both large and small.
Ok, so this is kind of interesting because to increase freedom, we would have to actively reduce existing legislation. So both sides, the side that sees government as the problem, and the side that sees government as the solution, have to get legislators on-board to actually do something to implement their plan.
Oh man, things aren't looking good for any of us on either side.
I have a minority view well outside the mainstream. Libertarians do best on individual issues. When analyzed in isolation the libertarian argument wins out for many things.
While libertarians lack official power, the market is so powerful that it drives tons of human activity without people even being aware. Also, the belief that the government is all-powerful and can actually solve problems is 99% fiction. So while people look to the president as someone to blame for problems or praise for solutions, the truth is that very little of consequence is in the president’s (or government’s) control. So being a libertarian is a state of mind - the acknowledgment that the source of happiness and purpose is ultimately your own concern and no one else can do this for you. Not having a seat in government means nothing because libertarians generally don’t want government and it’s usually fairly easy to ignore, legally avoid paying taxes to through a variety of loopholes and structures in our Byzantine tax code, and is so ineffective it’s mind boggling that it ever gets anything done beyond corruption and graft.
So to come full circle, I believe governments are far weaker than most admit or recognize, and power is increasingly in the hands of private people and organizations. And I welcome this shift in power.
Both you and the person you are responding to have held a very interesting and civil discussion on a topic that is often charged. Thank you both for expressing these ideas so sanely. I found both the retraining "valley" from the parent poster and your positioning of libertarian worldviews as a state of mind interesting and crisp. Cheers.
The concept assumes there are replacement jobs being created. That was true for a hundred years, it hasn't been for the last 20+.
At some point automation eliminates jobs wholesale, and there aren't replacements waiting. People always refer to cars replacing horses and point out that all those jobs surrounding horses were replaced with something else - manufacturing plant jobs, car salesman, etc. What they fail to mention is that HORSES were replaced with CARS - and we've got far, far, far fewer horses on the planet today because they're just not needed.
I’m sympathetic that government can help those who lose jobs. My preference is straight-up cash transfers so they can pick their own schools and move to where jobs are, rather than a government-run school loaded with bureaucracy. But artificially preserving shrinking industries just so we can all act like we still need them around is a waste of tax dollars and is logically inconsistent.