[energy123]

Ethical issues of putting people out of a job? Please. This mindset has to be called out because it directly causes suffering via creating a societal permission structure for politicians to protect interest groups with protectionist trade policy and internal pork barreling policy.

Economic productivity putting people out of jobs is both good and necessary and it is unethical to work against it.

[dehrmann]

My favorite example of complaints about "putting people out of jobs" is that's an argument against self-serve gas in New Jersey (and recently Oregon).

[energy123]

It's an argument against all innovation and progress.

There should be social safety nets to ease people's transition. Not protectionism of unproductive jobs.

[nathan_compton]

I think the commenter was definitely somewhat glib in their statement, but I don't think the case is as clear cut as you think.

The way I've come to think of the current moment in history is that capitalism allocates resources via markets and we use this system because in many situations its highly efficient. But governments allocate resources democratically exactly because we do not always want to allocate resources efficiently with respect to making money.

Whether it "makes sense" or not, most people believe there is more to life than the efficient allocation of resources and thus it might be a reasonable opinion that making 100,000 people suddenly unemployed is bad. I doubt seriously that the OP believes having 100,000 people working indefinitely when the labor can be done more efficiently by machines is good. I think most reasonable people want to see the transition handled more smoothly than a pure market capitalism would do it.

[thwarted]

One might argue that the government allocating some resources is more efficient than the market doing so purely because specific outcomes are desired that the invisible hand is not motivated or incentivized to provide. If the goal is to keep people healthy, efficiency is based on how successful that is, not on the monetary cost. Few people seem to understand it this way, though.

[nradov]

In most cases government employees simply aren't prescient enough to allocate resources efficiently. Like in theory maybe central planning could be more efficient if everything worked correctly, but in practice it never works efficiently at scale. Much of the resources simply end up wasted.

[thwarted]

If one looks to "government employees", as individuals, then yes, they aren't prescient enough to allocate resources efficiently. But comparing the free market to government employees is not an apples to apples comparison, because individuals don't allocate resources efficiently either in a free market; the "market" as a whole is what optimizes for efficiency.

And I think there is a distinction in different kinds of efficiency that can be optimized for, not just monetary cost. If we desire clean, paved, safe roads, that can be used by all equally for efficient movement of goods, because we recognize that as a prereq for a strong economy, we can not rely on the free market to deliver that, much less optimize for it. It can be more efficient, in terms of actually delivering the desired goal vs not delivering it at all (or delivering a grossly bastardized version of it) to pool our resources and explicitly work towards making something available rather than hoping that the free market will deliver it.

The free market did not deliver on reducing congestion in New York (in fact, one might say that over the decades, the free market is what made it worse), but the congestion pricing program has, and has resulted in a bunch of valuable/desirable knock-on effects.

I do not think that a centrally planned economy is workable; but collectively being deliberate about building the things we need/want, and taking a longer view, can result in significant efficiencies.

The free market ends up simply wasting resources in its drive to discover where efficiencies lie and how to take advantage of them.

[nathan_compton]

I'm not sure this is the way to think about it. It obviously matters if money is being wasted, but the question is to what end is the money utilized?

In capitalism, roughly speaking, the purpose of spending money is to generate a return on investment and the market does a reasonable job of doing that and a reasonable knock-on effect is rising standards of living, etc.

But in health care, for example, we might decide that a return on investment isn't the point, but the efficient allocation of resources still matters, to the end of making people healthier. Its more that free markets really struggle to optimize efficiency that isn't directed towards ROI. I think its a genuinely moral philosophical question - if you really prioritize freedom over all else, then markets are sort of the best you can do and you just give up on collective or philosophically motivated goals. But, genuinely, and I think the current political moment underscores this basic fact, people care about plenty of other things besides freedom and even besides democracy.

[ImPostingOnHN]

> it directly causes suffering via creating a societal permission structure for politicians to protect interest groups with protectionist trade policy and internal pork barreling policy

What part of that is suffering, if it enables 100k constituents to put food on the table?

[patmcc]

We could employ 100k people to dig holes and then fill them back in; should we?

We shouldn't employ people in economically un-viable ways just because they need income. We can just give them money directly, or redirect them to other work, or a combination of the two.

[ImPostingOnHN]

> We could employ 100k people to dig holes and then fill them back in; should we?

If that is what's necessary to provide a social safety net, then maybe so. See the works progress administration for an example of this.

> We can just give them money directly, or redirect them to other work

Ideally yes, but that isn't happening, hence the first option.

We may be straying here, though: this discussion didn't start out with someone saying what someone else should or shouldn't do. We were discussing the ethical and economic consequences of an idea.

[Moomoomoo309]

"My father worked two jobs to have money to throw in the money pit!" - The Onion

I wonder if we were in a post-scarcity world, what we'd think of stuff like this.

[matwood]

The problem is that it's a misallocation of human capital which slows progress for all of society. We should be providing social safety nets for people, not fake jobs.

[ImPostingOnHN]

> We should be providing social safety nets for people, not fake jobs.

I agree with you (except in classifying the genuine effort of my fellow people to be "fake jobs" just because a computer can do some of the work) and believe making a resilient, trustworthy, proven system for the former is a prerequisite to withdrawing the latter, to avoid suffering.

Unfortunately for us, the barrier to the former is ideological in nature and imposed by the elite few in power now, before any matters of capital allocation (human or financial) come into play.

[justinrubek]

Nobody has classified genuine effort as fake. But what good is genuine effort when it can be done much more easily without it? There's no shame whatsoever in this. At least, I don't think we should add any to the situation.

[ImPostingOnHN]

> Nobody has classified genuine effort as fake. But what good is genuine effort when it can be done much more easily without it?

This was previously stated: the good being done is 100,000 people can feed their families. What good is going without that? You'll enrich some private equity dudes and make a lot more people unemployed and a lot more families unhappy.

[Muromec]

Or do neither of that and get a proper revolt to learn that lesson again.

[reaperducer]

These are human beings, not human capital.

[throw10920]

Claims handling is fake jobs?

[nradov]

No, but claims processing is already highly automated across much of the insurance industry and the level of automation will only increase in the future.