[p2p-research] Structural Unemployment... round #3527

[Edward Miller]

Thank you Paul for all your insightful comments on technological
unemployment. Being fairly obsessed with this topic, I would like to add a
few thoughts of my own.

The biggest refutation of the logic of structural unemployment is the fact
that as production becomes more efficient, prices decrease, and thus the
cost of living decreases. This means people can afford to work for less
money.

Now, when it comes to rapid advancements in AI, etc, this point can become
moot. However, I am mainly going to talk about the near term.

In the mean time we have lots of other policies like minimum wage and
environmental regulations which makes human labor more expensive and
incentivizes automation. So we may have structural unemployment, but not
because of market forces. However, the rationale for my support of the Basic
Income and similar P2P/post-scarcity policies really has little or nothing
to do with the idea of structural unemployment.

Perhaps a period of structural unemployment may be one of the only ways to
reorient policies to be more forward-thinking... shorter work week, prizes
for the technology commons, stronger overtime, Basic Income, etc. Of course
it would be a very painful process, but I really don't see any other way to
get there. I actually think we should push for more policies that increase
the cost of human labor (and hopefully are good in their own right), and
hopefully create structural unemployment. My working theory right now is
that this is what has happened in much of Europe.

The idea of the poor having less children and the rich having more is
something I have thought about before as well. It seems pretty obvious for
anyone with a utilitarian bent. To narrow the disparity between the
developed and developing world, actually promoting development is the
easiest and most effective way, and would require shifting our aid from
handing out food to providing open technology and other means of production.

To narrow the fertility disparity within developed nations like the US, then
you have to talk about changing welfare incentive structures (Basic
Income!), choice architecture, sex education, etc. Coercion is almost
totally off the table in my opinion..... though if some fundamentalist
genetically engineers herself to be able to have dozens of babies who can
each have dozens more, then maybe some coercion is in order.

The main point I want to make is that there are actually two conflicting
things we are pushing. On one end the Open Source stuff and on the other the
Basic Income stuff... true once they both are implemented they'd feed on
each other in a virtuous circle, but since a Basic Income seems so unlikely
to be developed without structural unemployment.... Open Source's
deflationary effect could actually stave off the structural unemployment
which I argued we need.

Other tech and causes which most of us may or may not be on board with will
have similar effects. Buying organic food might be propping up some obsolete
occupations. In Vitro Meat is possibly one of the juiciest utilitarian
technologies to ever be proposed and the potential utility gains are
enormous... it will be a boon to animals, humans, and the environment. Yet,
about 75 percent of arable land is dedicated to raising and feeding
"livestock." In Vitro Meat would cause land prices to plummet, food prices
to plummet, and thus human labor costs to plummet.

I'm not saying we should oppose any of this stuff... I'm just saying we need
to fight on both ends. Perhaps the easiest and most politically acceptable
thing to do is raise the minimum wage. The minimum wage is retarded from
every angle except promoting automation and disincentivizing labor, but for
some reason mainstream people like it.

I am just as uncomfortable promoting a brief but intense period of suffering
as anyone, so if anyone has better ideas I'm all ears. If there are no other
ways, and one disagrees with this approach, then I'd need to see some
rigorous utilitarian justification for why we should forgo the Basic Income
side of things.
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