There are barely any customers in this country now. We're operating off credit: the US (as a currency, not just the government) is 1.2 trillion in the red. It's an accounting identity, it can't be argued with.
It's an inevitability that people unproductive in the real economy will get cut off. You can't run an economy on gigwork that just makes parasitic upper-middle and upper-class lives more comfortable. Elite comfort isn't real production. You cannot feed, clothe, or house people with Uber rides and advertising. Instead, in the US, you feed, clothe, and house people with imports, purchased with borrowed foreign currency.
And the government takes whatever it gets and redistributes it upwards to capital-intensive industries and "US" businesses that are completely supplied by imports. It's almost an optimized destruction.
How do you square that China is way more in the red than the USA and things like their high speed rail aren't able to pay down the construction loans, let alone cover the coming maintenance?
China is operating on the 'I just bought a new house so my only expense is my mortgage and I have no technical debt because it's all new' position, which doesn't last.
The USA is in the 'all we have is technical debt' phase. Which means smart investment spending can bring real gains IF we don't allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by where we currently are.
The problem is our 'elites' got addicted to that post 2010 hyper short term growth based on digital products. Boeing management moved to DC away from production, because to modern American business the product is removed from the company, something to outsource to someone else. Our MBA/management/leadership types are too precious to be wasted on those sorts of details.
The same thing we are doing now: nothing. The poor already aren't customers, and what remains of the middle class is already being priced out of basic necessities.
Have no fear, they are gunning for the upper class, now. A quick glance at big tech gutting their ranks is just the beginning for high wage earners.
History shall repeat itself, and many of those jobs will vanish forever.
This is a discussion Jimmy Carter wanted to have when computers were just becoming mainstream --- the idea was the taxes on the sales of computers would be used to fund worker re-training --- cue old news stories about the compositor unions bargaining for sinecures and the last compositor retiring after decades of punching in and sitting in the breakroom all day.
LLMs and robotics look to be the first mainstream technological development in a long while which not only reduces the number of workers needed, but also doesn't have a commensurate increasing of the size of the economy in terms of increased wages through efficiency and profits being paid as wages --- instead, it is the concentration of profits by those who own the means of production as Karl Marx warned about and the Luddites feared.
If less work is needed to keep society running, why not have a reduction in the work week, and either pay folks overtime (in keeping with the increased efficiencies/profits) or have more workers (to reflect the added efficiency and spread out the workload).
> Or, perhaps it's time for universal basic income?
Funded by Carters idea where we tax corporations for job elimination. For every head you reduce with automation you pay a tax to help support that head in their time of unemployment. Then we tax the automation products.
Of course with the current government situation this isn't happening. Ever.
Sounds unironically great, this way only startups that have nobody to fire will grow
let GM figure out how to file the paperwork and another company can replace it
To jump in on the political, in minimum wage "debates" the conservative side was always that higher minimum wage will encourage automation.
But as we look at post-pandemic automation (the counter operator is mostly replaced by an app) or automation (China's robots per capital), or tax policies that encourage capital spending (2018 tax bill, depreciation) it becomes obvious that automation will happen and is in many ways good. But our policy makers, media, and therefore average voter miss the forest for the trees.
>LLMs and robotics look to be the first mainstream technological development in a long while which not only reduces the number of workers needed, but also doesn't have a commensurate increasing of the size of the economy in terms of increased wages through efficiency and profits being paid as wages
This article (with limited data I'll note) only talks about the first part -- that it's eliminating jobs. It doesn't say that it isn't also creating jobs.
LLMs have only been a big deal for 2 years. are you saying that all of this middle class shrinkage arrived because of that specifically? the original comment was saying this is an LLM-specific issue.
UBI is going to be the only option eventually, outside of a moneyless, post-scarcity utopia.
Investing in subsidized worker retraining can work very short term, but with widespread automation and a reduced requirement for human workers, that can only go so far as the demand for employees simply won’t be there.
So we either have strong laws and protections that enforce that everyone receives the benefits of automation, or we don’t and only a small percentage of the population receives the benefits while everyone else starves to death.
There is no reduced requirement for human workers. Our infrastructure is crumbling, and we're using as many Chinese, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Pakistani, Indian, Mexican, etc. workers as we always have.
The only reason America itself fell into dust is because they couldn't figure out how to ship bridges and high speed rail from China. They were hoping that removing all border controls would be the answer, but people who used to have good paying jobs making and building things got upset.
The Democratic Party strategy to ridicule and censor them into silence seems to have failed miserably, but the Republican strategy of making a huge show out of deporting 30 poverty-stricken refugees while ignoring businesses who employ tens of thousands is working.
Nobody has managed the politics of a true UBI, and America will be one of the last places to get it. The need to punish perceived slackers is just too high.
> The need to punish perceived slackers is just too high.
That's because the US was always in a race to find more enemies to fight. It's an easy way to rally the many under a single banner and then move the banner around as needed by the few.
Well, sometimes perception is reality. If you have too many slackers, then your group/society stops functioning altogether and/or succumbs to other, more successful groups.
Then it doesn't matter what entitlements you think you should have been getting (or were getting)
Also, based on your phrasing, you seem to think that the current system punishes slackers (and/or perceived slackers) and that's our collective preference? In your opinion is this being done deliberately, or just through regular pricing mechanisms of capitalism?
As a whole, in the US, people don't even want people to have free healthcare. What do you think the chances are that they want people to have "free" money?
Nobody has been talking about UBI except in the same sense that people talk about warp drives, i.e. as a nice-to-have-someday bit of speculative fiction. Everyone is aware that if UBI were actually proposed in the political sphere it would be killed immediately, by most of the some oligarchs who dishonestly talk about it now.
But when consumers disappear and the wealth is threatened, won’t it simply be the only solution to keep the show going for the oligarchs? It may well be inevitable.
High income consumers are a steadily increasing percentage of consumer spending, and the bottom 60% of consumers are something like 20% of all spend. One outcome is just that the trend continues and high income consumers spend more which offsets decreases in low income consumers.
I think this is part of the reason why Apple has been promoting subscription services. iPhones have historically been apple's largest revenue source, but revenues have been increasing, from about 10% to 20% over the last 10 years.
Lets say the lower 50% of consumers buy something like a $1000 phone every 4 years currently, and they switch to buying a 16e for $600, or a decrease of $100 a year per customer. In revenue terms you could offset this by selling .5 customers a $240 a year Apple one subscription, up-selling a iPhone pro customer to 1TB storage, or convincing someone to buy a pair of Airpods Max over regular Airpods.
It's an inevitability that people unproductive in the real economy will get cut off. You can't run an economy on gigwork that just makes parasitic upper-middle and upper-class lives more comfortable. Elite comfort isn't real production. You cannot feed, clothe, or house people with Uber rides and advertising. Instead, in the US, you feed, clothe, and house people with imports, purchased with borrowed foreign currency.
And the government takes whatever it gets and redistributes it upwards to capital-intensive industries and "US" businesses that are completely supplied by imports. It's almost an optimized destruction.