Jobsolescence

page type::article page type::definition thing type::concept thing type::problem

Definition
jobsolescence (n.), also known as technological unemployment, is the phenomenon whereby increasing automation enables production capacity to be maintained with a shrinking quantity of workers, resulting in shrinking employment, resulting in reduced wealth distribution and therefore increased economic disparity.

Note that off-shoring of jobs is also the result of automation, as it could not be done effectively without modern telecommunication.

Usage
In colloquial usage, it can refer to:
 * the fact of having one's particular job rendered obsolete
 * the fact of jobs in general, as a means of survival for individuals and as a way for society to allocate resources, becoming obsolete

These are examples of how the word might be used in writing or conversation:
 * The paradox of jobsolescence is that it results in severe deprivation in the midst of plenty.
 * In 2011, the capitalist system reached a crisis point, with thousands of jobsolescent workers flooding the streets of major cities around the world seeking new solutions for wealth redistribution. They were told by the establishment, with no sense of irony, to 'get a job'.
 * The system I designed for VeryBigTek to help with my work there is so efficient that they were able to lay off 5 employees -- including me. I've been rendered jobsolete.

Mechanisms
The following mechanisms seem to be in operation.
 * 1) Automation of labor
 * 2) * Employment generally only occurs when the private benefit of having a task done is worth the cost of paying a worker to do it.
 * 3) * Automation is replacing more and more jobs with machinery that costs considerably less than this to operate and maintain.
 * 4) * No matter how skilled a given worker may be, or how much effort they put into retraining themselves, there will come a time when a machine is better suited for any job they might be able to do.
 * 5) * The more skilled the worker, the longer it will be before this happens -- but the bar is continuously being raised.
 * 6) * This results in a continually-shrinking pool of jobs at any given skill level.
 * 7) * Those who are laid off due to automation are therefore not likely to find new jobs, as they will have to (a) retrain for a new job, and (b) compete with others who already have such training.
 * 8) Imprisonment of resources
 * 9) * As automation reduces the cost of production, the intake of profit soars without increasing the rate at which those profits are distributed.
 * 10) * Wealth is privately retained by the owners of automated production facilities. These owners do not have any use for most of the increase in their wealth, and when they do use it they generally use it to accumulate even more wealth (e.g. by buying up competing businesses, loaning money at interest to those less fortunate, etc.)
 * 11) * Wealth becomes increasingly scarce in the economy at large.
 * 12) Evaporation of public benefit
 * 13) * There are many tasks which are not being done because although their public benefit is certainly great enough to make them worth doing, their private benefit is insufficient to convert the task into employment.
 * 14) * When people are employed at a decent salary and reasonable hours, this leaves many of them with spare resources and energy to devote to work of high public benefit and low private benefit. When more and more people are employed at inadequate salaries or excessive hours (e.g. via multiple jobs or working unpaid overtime under threat of being fired), they will increasingly lack the resources or time to engage in such projects.

Benefits
It now takes a quite small percentage of society -- a relatively small number of people -- to produce basic goods and services that all of us need in order to survive at a reasonable level of contentment and freedom. It should therefore be economically possible to allow many people a guaranteed income without requiring them to work.

The required percentage of society is larger if we include goods and services that many people want, but it is still relatively small. Indeed, many of our "wants" represent socially useless production, and public desire for them has been deliberately engineered in order to increase demand for production.

This reduction in necessary labor reduces the amount of consumables we each need in order to live happily while also improving the quality of life on average, thus increasing the human carrying-capacity of our ecosystem (hopefully to the point where we can level off population growth before a crisis occurs).

Costs

 * Economic disparity leads to widespread suffering and economic instability.
 * Large-scale centralization of wealth enables:
 * market distortion, undermining the functioning of free markets.
 * regulatory capture, undermining the functioning of a free society.

Areas for Reform

 * Much of the wealth that is now being imprisoned is not being used by those who hold it. That excess wealth would do far more good if redistributed.
 * Many tasks that people do for "employment" are socially useless production -- i.e. essentially make-work or (worse) are part of the process of concentrating wealth in the hands of a few. Eliminating these jobs would be of general benefit, as doing so would reduce the overall usage of consumables without reducing the overall quality of life.

Proposals
The following proposals have been made in reaction to this situation:
 * Reduced work-week (would increase the number of people needed to accomplish a given task and therefore the number of jobs)
 * Problems:
 * only somewhat increases wealth redistribution, and doesn't do anything to repair the safety-net for those who still can't find work
 * decreases efficiency; is basically make-work, in many cases
 * Require businesses to hire a certain number of employees, at a living wage, for every million dollars of revenue or profit. This number would be calculated based on the total adult population multiplied by that business's share of the "economic pie", guaranteeing that essentially all of the population would be employed. (In practicality, businesses would probably tell many of their employees to just stay home.)
 * Increase taxes on the most profitable businesses to the point where the government could afford to provide a guaranteed income to everyone.

Caveats
There remain some tasks that need doing -- we can't all just stop working.

Conclusions
Jobsolescence will continue to be a growing problem as long as we depend on the concept of employment as a means of allocating wealth and therefore basic needs.

Society must be significantly restructured so that employment is no longer required in order to survive at a reasonable level. (The possible results of successful reform along these lines are generally referred to as a post-employment economy and post-scarcity economics.)

Related

 * Jobsolescence is one of the primary causes of increasing economic disparity.
 * A post-employment economy is an economy in which employment is not a requisite for a reasonably prosperous life.
 * Post-scarcity economics is the study of economics in the circumstance where basic needs and wants can be produced without engaging the majority of society as production labor.

Quotes
We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors.

The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living. &mdash; Buckminster Fuller (, GoodReads)

There is no reason why, in a society which has reached the general level of wealth ours has, the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom; that is: some minimum of food, shelter and clothing, sufficient to preserve health. Nor is there any reason why the state should not help to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance in providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision. &mdash; F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (to be verified)

Reference

 * : no entry as of 2013-06-04
 * Jobsolescence posts on Google+
 * Google+ post where I first suggested this word
 * ICMS:
 * post-employment economy
 * Jobsolescence: book in progress

Discussion

 * Technological Unemployment
 * "There are NO JOBS" Community

Fiction

 * Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut: Widespread mechanization in a future society creates conflict between the wealthy upper class – the engineers and managers who keep society running – and the lower class, whose skills and purpose in society have been replaced by machines.

to file

 * 2014-02-25 Robots will take our jobs — but will they steal our hearts?: also references The Second Machine Age
 * 2014-01-24 Erik Brynjolfsson Explains How Technology Drives Inequality And The Scary Truth About Robots Taking Human Jobs
 * summary
 * critique of The Second Machine Age
 * 2013-11-03 Surviving the post-employment economy (via): "The author argues that in the new economy, it's people, not skills or majors, that have lost value."
 * 2011-06-21 Obama, ATMs And Rage Against The Rise Of Machines
 * 2012-04-26 The wedges between productivity and median compensation growth: one version of the classic productivity-vs.-wages graph
 * 2012-06 Andrew McAfee: Are droids taking our jobs? (TED Talk)
 * Graph: Civilian Employment-Population Ratio (EMRATIO)
 * 2013-04-11 Profits Just Hit Another All-Time High, Wages Just Hit Another All-Time Low by Henry Blodget
 * 2013-04-25 Why JOBS aren't coming back - not this life time!
 * 2013-04-29 Ten Responses to the Technological Unemployment Problem: potential ways of dealing with jobsolescence
 * 2013-05-02 Bipartisan Push to Buy Tanks Army Doesn’t Need: If Congress thinks we can afford this kind of waste, why not use that money to pay for social infrastructure?
 * 2013-05-03 The Idled Young Americans "The problems start with a lack of jobs."
 * commentary: Christine Paluch
 * 2013-05-05 Over 55, out of work more than six months? Headhunters say you’re screwed.
 * commentary: Pam Spaulding
 * 2013-05-13
 * Welcome, Robot Overlords. Please Don't Fire Us? by Kevin Drum
 * Who Will Own Our Future Robot Overlords? by Kevin Drum
 * 2013-05-21 Why the Market and Technology Aren’t Playing Well Together (and Five Possible Solutions to Fix the Problem)
 * 2013-06-01 After Your Job Is Gone
 * 2013-06-13
 * Sympathy for the Luddites by Paul Krugman
 * Basic income versus the robots
 * 2013-06-20 Google uses Big Data to prove hiring puzzles useless and GPAs meaningless: companies use filters like hiring puzzles and GPAs simply to filter down the vast number of applicants in some objective way (where an individual can't be blamed for making the wrong decision, i.e. CYA)
 * 2013-06-29 Rodney Brooks: why we will rely on robots: the other side of jobsolescence -- robots make life easier, and we will need them more as the old-to-young ratio increases
 * 2013-07-17 Top 20 economies still struggling to create jobs
 * 2013-08-19 On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
 * commentary
 * 2013-08-22
 * Bismarck Is Lovely This Time of Year
 * commentary/discussion
 * Jobs Are Not the Answer: The BIG Idea that Socialists and Libertarians Can Agree On?: claims that Milton Freedman endorsed the idea of a Basic Income Guarantee (in the form of a negative income tax), but I seem to recall Richard Wolff saying that he and other libertarians later backpedaled on that
 * 2013-08-23 Who Are the Long-Term Unemployed?
 * 2013-08-24 How Technology Wrecks the Middle Class: rejects the idea that automation reduces employment; I respond in a comment here
 * 2013-09-03 America’s Jobless Generation
 * commentary
 * 2013-09-12 Report Suggests Nearly Half of U.S. Jobs Are Vulnerable to Computerization
 * 2013-10-10 Gartner's dark vision for tech, jobs "In a world where smart machines do most of the work, expect high unemployment, unrest and tumult"
 * 2013-10-17 An army of robot baristas could mean the end of Starbucks as we know it