{"id":4280,"date":"2015-06-11T19:04:33","date_gmt":"2015-06-11T19:04:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/?p=4280"},"modified":"2015-06-12T01:43:41","modified_gmt":"2015-06-12T01:43:41","slug":"hope-machines-take-our-jobs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/blog\/2015\/06\/hope-machines-take-our-jobs\/","title":{"rendered":"Let\u2019s Hope Machines Take Our Jobs: We Want Wealth, Not Jobs – Article by Peter St. Onge"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\"The<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Peter St. Onge
\n<\/big><\/big><\/strong><\/span><\/div>\n
June 11, 2015<\/big><\/span><\/div>\n
******************************<\/div>\n
\n

The job-threatening rise of the machines is an economically illiterate meme that refuses to die. We\u2019re actually probably in the early stages of it, a bull-market in neo-luddism, if you will. Bastiat\u2019s \u201cCandlemakers’ Petititon\u201d answered this one long ago, but today I\u2019ll run a little thought experiment that owes it all to good old Bastiat.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s say Weird Al Yankovic invents a machine capable of making everything with a single push of a button. The first thing he does is print up a bunch of machines and sell them for a ton. Weird Al is now a billionaire, and there are thousands of make-everything machines.<\/p>\n

This diffusion of Weird Al\u2019s new technology replicates the market process, where new tech spreads in proportion to its usefulness. If you doubt this, because of patents, for example, check out Brazil\u2019s experience with AIDS drugs, where they tore up the patents on humanitarian grounds.<\/p>\n

Weird Al\u2019s machines will, at a minimum, be mass produced in Brazil. Or China. Or Mozambique.<\/p>\n

So, one way or another, we get a bunch of make-everything machines.<\/p>\n

What happens to the jobs? We\u2019re getting everything for near-free now. So all the production jobs disappear. There are still lots of jobs, of course \u2014 child care, gardeners, musicians. But all the production jobs have vanished \u2014 something like 20 percent of jobs, maybe up to 50 percent when you include knock-on replacement of people by capital (truck drivers, robot bartenders). Heck, let\u2019s go crazy and say 90 percent of the jobs vanished. Nobody\u2019s got a job outside of preschool or performing on a stage. It\u2019s the end of the world, right?<\/p>\n

Well, the key is that, now that everything is made with the push of a button, everything\u2019s extremely cheap. For example, a sixteen-bedroom house or a Lamborghini costs almost nothing. Let\u2019s say they now cost ten cents.<\/p>\n

The main expense in such a world is probably surface space. All those dime-a-dozen cars have to park somewhere. It\u2019d take a while to \u201crun out\u201d of space, though \u2014 divide the world by the people and you get about twenty acres (eight hectares) for a family of four \u2014 about 100 large surburban yards. Add in the oceans \u2014 floating islands cost nothing, remember \u2014 and triple that. We end up with about 300 homes’ worth of space per family.<\/p>\n

What about those unemployed people? Well, when a house or a year\u2019s food costs a dime, they\u2019ll be willing to work really cheap. We\u2019ll work for a penny a day. After all, that\u2019s a new house or a year’s food every two weeks.<\/p>\n

Who would hire these workers for a penny? Plenty of people. Heck, if workers cost a penny a day I\u2019d hire several for each of my children, just to keep the kids from getting bored. I\u2019d hire another to cook, one to clean, one to run errands. One to keep track of my mail. One to check Facebook for me. At a penny a day I\u2019d personally hire 100 people, easy. You would too \u2014 a buck a day\u2019s nothing.<\/p>\n

So the remaining 10 percent of workers who didn\u2019t lose their jobs \u2014 babysitters, baristas, musicians \u2014 would want 100 workers each. Even at a penny, they\u2019d take them all, and they\u2019d be paying an outrageous rate \u2014 a tenth-house per day! That\u2019s a daily rate of $15,000 in today\u2019s terms.<\/p>\n

Now, those who kept their jobs would, of course, see dropping wages. A barista who made $12 an hour in the old days would have to compete with the hordes of unemployed workers. Maybe her wage would drop to a penny, too. But, remember, a penny now buys $15,000 worth of stuff.<\/p>\n

When the smoke clears, most people would make some extremely low wages \u2014 a penny a day. And that extremely low wage would be worth an awful lot \u2014 $15,000 a day, implying an annual income north of several million dollars in today\u2019s values. Some lucky few would make a dollar a day \u2014 probably the people who are good at things machines cannot do: entertainment, child care, being a good listener, strumming the guitar at the retirement home, and laughing at jokes. At a dollar a day, this super-rich elite that excels at human skills \u2014 such as making us laugh \u2014 would be billionaires in today\u2019s values.<\/p>\n

Either way, there would be nothing we think of even remotely as \u201cpoverty.\u201d Sure, there\u2019ll be inequality, but it\u2019ll be relative: \u201cSarah\u2019s got 200 Lamborghinis and I\u2019ve only got 40.\u201d<\/p>\n

The upshot is that wages plunge, but production costs plunge even more. Of course, this is based on the ridiculous Weird Al machine. Why do this? To illustrate the absolute worst-case scenario, when machines make everything for near-nothing.<\/p>\n

What about going one step further: That the machine destroys all jobs in the whole world \u2014 it makes every single thing for us free, and it even keeps the folks entertained and the warm fuzzies flowing at the old folks’ home.<\/p>\n

Well, we\u2019ve already got a case study there \u2014 the sun. It gives us warmth and mangos for free. And how do we respond? We sit around and lazily enjoy it. So a machine that truly replaced all jobs would simply mean nobody works anymore \u2014 life\u2019s somewhere between a non-stop party and a non-stop pleasant walk in the woods followed by a nice bonfire with friends and chardonnay.<\/p>\n

We should all be so lucky that the machines do actually take every last job there is.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n
Peter St. Onge is an assistant professor at Taiwan’s Fengjia University College of Business. He blogs at Profits of Chaos<\/a>.<\/strong><\/div>\n
***<\/span><\/div>\n
This article was published on Mises.org<\/a> and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License<\/a>, which requires that credit be given to the author.<\/strong><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter St. Onge June 11, 2015 ****************************** The job-threatening rise of the machines is an economically illiterate meme that refuses to die. We\u2019re actually probably in the early stages of it, a bull-market in neo-luddism, if you will. Bastiat\u2019s \u201cCandlemakers’ Petititon\u201d answered this one long ago, but today I\u2019ll run a little thought experiment that owes it all to good old Bastiat. Let\u2019s say Weird Al Yankovic invents a machine capable of making everything with a single push of a…<\/p>\n

Read More Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,356],"tags":[314,836,268,4042,3782,4136,529,1668,109,4135],"class_list":["post-4280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-technology-2","tag-future","tag-jobs","tag-luddism","tag-mises-org","tag-peter-st-onge","tag-post-scarcity","tag-scarcity","tag-singularity","tag-technology","tag-weird-al"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4280"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4280\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4287,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4280\/revisions\/4287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}