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To: Kona who wrote (69143)	12/6/2010 6:07:37 PM
From: TobagoJack	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217709

oops just read your post i was forwarded same by e-mail as apology, i wikileak below from e-mail tray From: D Sent: Tue, December 7, 2010 5:51:19 AM Subject: Re: Observations - Week of November 22: world of robots replacing workers What about the standard of living earned by the people without income because there are no jobs? Is demand for labor down because the people with income that have the things that they want and need can have everything produced with less employment? The answer is yes. It is only a question of how material this is at the moment. With so many counties playing games to increase total employment without a lot of success at lowering the percentage of under/unemployed world wide it might be a sign that we have reached a tipping point. As productivity continues to go up it will become a more material cause of chronic unemployment but the real question is where we are at now. Will people without income and savings increase demand for goods in the future? Currently a lot of people have things they want and need but can not pay for because they do not have the option of gainful employment. Even if the size of the population changed the problem of to much productivity would not go away until the productivity dropped. Along with the productivity issue there is a limit to how fast we can consume the earth's resources. Having and consuming more each year from the time we started farming at some point that long experiment will come to an end from limited resources or we will continue in space. If we continue having and consuming more in space the economics of living space need to improve a lot. If we continue on earth there is a fixed ceiling of what percentage of the population can have jobs as we reach max resource extraction (might be getting close) intersecting with constantly increasing productivity. If we can not move society into space at some point it will have to be restructured so ability to live and self worth is not tied to employment or income from production or fall apart. There will always be a need for some to work so if living does not require working why would people fill the remaining jobs? Did the massive world wide bubble we just came out of provide a healthy level of world wide employment? Do the current unemployment problems throughout the world mean this issue is starting become material? This is very long wave and if it has become material after starting before recorded history investing against it will be punished. There was a time of happy peasants. That was when productivity had not gone up much and a lot of them had been killed off from plague the survivors did very well until the population recovered. The land owners had to treat them well if they wanted to see their fields get planted and harvested or live with zero income. It seems shortage of labor and ample capital (in this case land) is good for the bottom of society. If I had a choice I would like to see humans living the good life in space. We have a ways to go before space is the up scale place to live. On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 12:40 PM, H wrote: Ludwig von Mises on the topic of the Industrial Revolution. (link).Much of the modern-day view of the IR as a period of unmitigated wretchedness in need of correction. one must look at ALL the facts that marked the time (the 'happy peasants' that preceded the IR are a fairy tale - the hungry and wretched peasants is more accurate). as to 'will productivity increase forever' - let us hope so. until all human needs and wants are satisfied, and as long as at least a remnant of free market capitalism still exists and we don't consume too much or our accumulated capital due to foolish exercises such as QE, productivity will continue to increase. On Sat, Dec 4, 2010 at 9:21 AM, D wrote: Currently there are nations living in massive poverty like Haiti. Of course bad government is behind the poverty, however china still has a lot of under/unemployed and most of the western nations also have a growing group of under/unemployed. If the countries with chronic poverty are reformed this is still not employment for everyone in the role of making stuff. At the 10,000 foot level the only activity on the employment front is the move the under/unemployment issue around but looking at the earth as a whole I do not see it going away. Under/unemployed people get desperate so this condition is one of the elements that is making our current time period unstable. It would be best of a new category of jobs were coming on line now so we could avoid having the new activity being death and destruction of the others guys so you can take their stuff. In the early stages of the industrial revolution a lot of the jobs were unpleasant and I don't think they were always the first choice of the people displaced by the on going productivity improvements in agriculture. The good news for the period was that the displaced and the growing population did have something to do even if it was unpleasant. Even so the end game for the industrial revolution included world wars. The industrial revolution did not make a new category of activity it was just a massive increase in productivity over the old way of making product with craftsman increasing the amount of stuff people could have. The areas of activity for mankind to make a living have not changed for centuries while most if not all areas have had increased productivity which is massive over time with perhaps the exception of the sex trade. Electronics are still stuff, making movies is still acting (look at the productivity increase compared to groups of actors running around the country side), airplanes are still transportation while computers are just a form of paperwork. We might have a record number bureaucrats vs the total population (just guessing) perhaps that the solution? If the displaced are going to have to make do with the sex trade is seems like there would be good money in making them look good and selling cures for STDs. :) If we are at the end of a period where falling prices produced increased demand for a category of service that was satisfied by meaningful increases in employment it would be a new thing. When we changed from hunting and gathering to domestic crops and animals it was also a new thing and in time the hunting and gathering has been pushed to the edges. In our history after domestic crops and animals there were ebbs and flows in population, productivity and economic expansion but in all cases manpower had was absorbed in increased demand for a category of service. Can productivity go up forever? We will get buried in stuff! On Fri, Dec 3, 2010 at 11:15 AM, H wrote: it was always clear that if economic progress continued, more and more work would be done by machines. Certainly whenever large technological revolutions occur, there is upheaval in the jobs market (a good example is the replacement of the horse by the car), but that does not mean we will be sitting with 'millions of surplus workers with nothing to do'. there is always work to do. it will just be different work from before. it is the very object of economic activity and capital accumulation to do 'more with less'. there is nothing to be feared from this progress, on the contrary, it must be welcomed, because it will give us the time to do the work to satisfy other human wants that currently are 'underserviced' as too many people are still needed to produce the most urgently needed goods. don't forget, one effect of the 'robotization' will be the 'commoditization' of more and more manufactured goods (in the sense that they will become cheaper and cheaper). that will leave more money for other things. there will be jobs in the future that we can not even imagine yet, just as nobody in the 1970's could imagine the job of 'web master' or 'java programmer' or nobody in 1850 could imagine the job of 'airplane pilot'.