AI may give us more efficiency, but it will be filled with more bullshit jobs and consumption, not more leisure.
We live in a time that the working class is unbelievably brainwashed and manipulated.
Keynes lived in a time when the working class could not buy cheap from China... and complain that everybody else was doing the same!
> We live in a time that the working class is unbelievably brainwashed and manipulated.
I think it has always been that way. Looking through history, there are many examples of turkeys voting for Christmas and propaganda is an old invention. I don’t think there is anything special right now. And to be fair to the working class, it’s not hard to see how they could feel abandoned. It’s also broader than the working class. The middle class is getting squeezed as well. The only winners are the oligarchs.
I think progress (in the sense of economic growth) was roughly in line with what Keynes expected. What he didn't expect is that people, instead of getting 10x the living standard with 1/3 the working hours, rather wanted to have 30x the living standard with the same working hours.
Throughout human history, starting with the spread of agriculture, increased labor efficiency has always led to people consuming more, not to them working less.
Moreover, throughout the 20th century, we saw several periods in different countries when wages rose very rapidly - and this always led to a temporary average increase in hours worked. Because when a worker is told "I'll pay you 50% more" - the answer is usually not "Cool, I can work 30% less", but "Now I'm willing to work 50% more to get 2x of the pay".
The words 'have to' are doing a lot of work in that statement. Some people 'have to' work to literally put food on the table, other people 'have to' work to able to making payments on their new yacht. The world is full of people who could probably live out the rest of their lives without working any more, but doing so would require drastic lifestyle changes they're not willing to make.
I personally think the metric should be something along the lines of how long would it take from losing all your income until you're homeless.
Does one have savings? Can they afford to spend time with their children outside of working day to day? Do they have the ability to take reasonable risks without chancing financial ruin in pursuit of better opportunities?
These are things we typically attribute to someone in the middle class. I worry that boiling down these discussions to “you work and they don’t” misses a lot of opportunity for tangible improvement to quality of life for large number of people.
I agree with your point. Now doctors are working class as well.
No need for AI. Troll farms are well documented and were in action before transformers could string two sentences together.
All the free money dried up and the happy clapping Barney the Dinosaur Internet was no more!
I will not go into specifics because the authoritarians still disagree and think everything is fine with degenerative debauchery and try to abuse anyone even just pointing to failing systems, but it all does seem like civilization ending developments regardless of whether it leads to the rise of another civilization, e.g., the Asian Era, i.e., China, India, Russia, Japan, et al.
Ironically, I don’t see the US surviving this transitional phase, especially considering it essentially does not even really exist anymore at its core. Would any of the founders of America approve of any of America today? The forefathers of India, China, Russia, and maybe Japan would clearly approve of their countries and cultures. America is a hollowed out husk with a facade of red, white, and blue pomp and circumstance that is even fading, where America means both everything and nothing as a manipulative slogan to enrich the few, a massive private equity raid on America.
When you think of the Asian countries, you also think of distinct and unique cultures that all have their advantages and disadvantages, the true differences that make them true diversity that makes humanity so wonderful. In America you have none of that. You have a decimated culture that is jumbled with all kinds of muddled and polluted cultures from all over the place, all equally confused and bewildered about what they are and why they feel so lost only chasing dollars and shiny objects to further enrich the ever smaller group of con artist psychopathic narcissists at the top, a kind of worst form of aristocracy that humanity has yet ever produced, lacking any kind of sense of noblesse oblige, which does not even extend to simply not betraying your own people.
That there's any cultural "degenerative debauchery" is an extraordinary claim. Can you back up this claim with evidence?
"Decimated," "muddled," and "polluted" imply you have an objective analysis framework for culture. Typically people who study culture avoid moralizing like this because one very quickly ends up looking very foolish. What do you know that the anthropologists and sociologists don't, to where you use these terms so freely?
If I seem aggressive, it's because I'm quite tired of vague handwaving around "degeneracy" and identity politics. Too often these conversations are completely presumptive.
What's the sense in asking for examples? If one person sees ubiquitous cultural decay and the other says "this is fine," I think the difference is down to worldview. And for a pessimist and an optimist to cite examples at one another is unlikely to change the other's worldview.
If a pessimist said, "the opioid crisis is deadlier than the crack epidemic and nobody cares," would that change the optimist's mind?
If a pessimist said, "the rate of suicide has increased by 30% since the year 2000," would that change the optimist's mind?
If a pessimist said, "corporate profits, wealth inequality, household debt, and homelessness are all at record highs," ...?
And coming from the other side, all these things can be Steven Pinker'd if you want to feel like "yes there are real problems but actually things are better than ever."
There was a book that said something about "you will recognize them by their fruit." If these problems are the fruit born of our culture, it's worth asking how we got here instead of dismissing it with "What do you know that the anthropologists and sociologists don't?"
Capitalism arrives for everyone, Asia is just late for the party. Once it eventually financializes everything, the same will happen to it. Capitalism eventually eats itself, doesn't matter the language or how many centuries your people might have.
This creates supply-demand pressure for goods and services. Anything with limited supply such as living in the nice part of town will price out anyone working 15 hours/week.
And so society finds an equilibrium…
If minimum wage goes up 40/15 = 267%, then the price of your coffee will go up 267% because the coffeeshop owner needs to pay 267% more to keep the cafe staffed.
The 40 hour work week is something a cultural equilibrium. But we've all heard of doctors, lawyers, and bankers working 100h weeks which affords them some of the most desirable real estate in the world...
Require anyone working over 15 hours to be paid time and a half overtime. If you want to hire one person to work 40 hours per week, that is 30% more expensive than hiring 3 people to work the same number of hours. In some select instances sure, having a single person do the job is worth the markup, and some people will be willing to work those hours, just like today you have some people working over 40, but in general the market will demand reduction in working hours.
Similarly, there is a strong incentive to work enough hours to be counted as a full time employee, so the marginal utility of that 35th hour is pretty high currently, whereas if full time benefits and labor protections started at 15 hours, then the marginal utility of that 35th hour would be substantially less.
> If minimum wage goes up 40/15 = 267%, then the price of your coffee will go up 267% because the coffeeshop owner needs to pay 267% more to keep the cafe staffed.
That would be true if 100% of the coffee shop's revenue went to wages. Obviously that's not the case. In reality, the shop is buying ingredients, paying rent for the space, paying off capex for the coffee making equipment, utilizing multiple business services like accounting and marketing, and hopefully at the end of the day making some profit. Realistically, wages for a coffee shop are probably 20-30% of revenue. So to cover the increased cost of labor, prices would have to rise 53%. Note that in this scenario you also have 267% more money to spend on coffee.
Of course there are some more nuances as prices in general inflate. Ultimately though, the equilibrium you reach is that people working minimum wage for a full workweek wind up able to afford 1 minimum-wage workweek worth of goods and services. This holds true in the long term regardless of what level minimum wage is or how long a workweek is. Indeed you could just as easily have everyone's wages stay exactly the same but we are all working less, then we all have less money and there is a deflationary effect but in the long term we wind up at the same situation. Ideally, you'd strike a balance between these two which reaches the same end state with a reasonably steady money supply.
> The 40 hour work week is something a cultural equilibrium.
No, it isn't. It is an arbitrary convention, one in a long series which had substantially different values in the past. It has remained constant because it is encoded in law in such a way that it is no longer subject to simple pressures of labor supply and demand.
> But we've all heard of doctors, lawyers, and bankers working 100h weeks which affords them some of the most desirable real estate in the world...
There are a lot more than just doctors and lawyers and bankers working long hours. 37% of americans work 2 full time jobs, and most of them aren't exactly in a position to afford extremely desirable real estate. If the workweek were in a equilibrium due to supply and demand, wouldn't these people just be working more hours at their regular jobs?
There can be a certain snobbishness with academics where they are like of course I enjoy working away on my theories of employment but the unwashed masses do crap jobs where they'd rather sit on their arses watching reality TV. But it isn't really like that. Usually.
I'll take capitalism with all its warts over that workers paradise any day.
Even myself, work a job that I enjoy building things that I’m good at, that is almost stress free, and after 10-15 years find that I would much rather spend time with my family or even spend a day doing nothing rather than spend another hour doing work for other people. the work never stops coming and the meaninglessness is stronger than ever.
That said, I’m not what you’d call a high-earning person (I earn < 100k) I simply live within my means and do my best to curb lifestyle creep. In this way, Keynes’ vision is a reality, but it’s a mindset and we also have to know when enough wealth is enough.
The arrangement was arrived at because the irregular income schedule makes an hourly wage or a salary a poor option for everyone involved. I’m grateful to work for a company where the owners value not only my time and worth but also value a similar work routine themselves.
It came about late last year when the current employer started going getting gently waved off in early funding pitches. That resulted in some thrash, forced marches to show we could ship, and the attendant burnout for me and a good chunk of the team I managed. I took a hard look at where the company was and where I was, and decided I didn't have another big grind in me right now.
Rather than just quit like I probably would have previously, I laid it out to our CEO in terms of what I needed: more time taking care of my family and myself, less pressure to deliver impossible things, and some broad idea of what I could say "no" to. Instead of laughing in my face, he dug in, and we had a frank conversation about what I _was_ willing to sign up for. That in turn resulted in a (slow, still work-in-progress) transition where we hired a new engineering leader and I moved into a customer-facing role with no direct reports.
Now I to work a part-time schedule, so I can do random "unproductive" things like repair the dishwasher, chaperone the kid's field trip, or spend the afternoon helping my retired dad make a Costco run. I can reasonably stop and say, "I _could_ pay someone to do that for me, but I actually have time this week and I can just get it done" and sometimes I...actually do, which is kind of amazing?
...and it's still fucking hard to watch the big, interesting decisions and projects flow by with other people tackling them and not jump in and offer to help. B/c no matter what a dopamine ride that path can be, it also leads to late nights and weekends working and traveling and feeling shitty about being an absentee parent and partner.
I suspect he didn't factor in how may people would be retired and on entitlements.
We're not SUPER far from that now, when you factor in how much more time off the average person has now, how much larger of percentage of the population is retired, and how much of a percentage is on entitlements.
The distribution is just very unequal.
I.E. if you're the median worker, you've probably seen almost no benefit, but if you're old or on entitlements, you've seen a lot of benefits.
Most people with a modest retirement account could retire in their forties to working 15-hour workweeks somewhere in rural America.
And then after living at the center of everything for 15-20 years be mentally prepared to move to “nowhere”, possibly before your kids head off to college.
Most cannot meet all those conditions and end up on the hedonic treadmill.
Yes to the latter, no to the former. The states with the highest savings rates are Connecticut, New Jersey, Minnesota, Massachussetts and Maryland [1]. Only Massachussetts is a top-five COL state [2].
> then after living at the center of everything for 15-20 years be mentally prepared to move to “nowhere”
This is the real hurdle. Ultimately, however, it's a choice. One chooses to work harder to access a scarce resource out of preference, not necessity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_savings...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_savings...
CA probably nowhere on the list because its such a small state that any Silicon Valley premium gets diluted at the state level average.
I am not finding a clear definition of this index but it appears to be $saved/$income (or $saved/$living expenses) right? So 114% in CT dollars is probably way more than 102% Kansas dollars..
It's also worth noting the point I was making is - if you take a "one years NYC income in savings" amount of money and relocate to say, New Mexico.. the money goes a lot further than trying to do the opposite!
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/21/icelan...
Policy matters
Yeah, I'd say I get up to 15 hours of work done in a 40 hour workweek.
instead, corporations chose to consume us
AI isn't going to generate those jobs, it's going to automate them.
ALL our bullshit jobs are going away, and those people will be unemployed.
When kids stop learning to code for real, who writes GCC v38?
This whole LLM is just the next bitcoin/nft. People had a lot of video cards and wanted to find a new use for them. In my small brain it’s so obvious.
to compare that to NFT’s is pretty disingenuous. i don’t know anyone who has ever accomplished anything with an NFT. (i’m happy to be wrong about that, and i have yet to find a single example).
Maybe consider it's not all on the AI tools if they work for others but not for you.
It's also the jobs that involve keeping people happy somehow, which may not be "productive" in the most direct sense.
One class of people that needs to be kept happy are managers. What makes managers happy is not always what is actually most productive. What makes managers happy is their perception of what's most productive, or having their ideas about how to solve some problem addressed.
This does, in fact, result in companies paying people to do nothing useful. People get paid to do things that satisfy a need that managers have perceived.
NONE of the bullshit jobs are going away, there will simply be bigger, more numerous bullshit.
I don’t know if it’s induced demand, revealed preference or Jevon’s paradox, maybe all 3.
OK, but I doubt we're washing 10 times as much clothes, unless are people wearing them for one hour between washes...
Citation needed.
(Quotes because I personally have a significantly harder time doing bloody housework...)
Before teaching your children to do chores: x hours per week for chores
After teaching your children to do chores: y hours per weeks to have annoying discussions with the child, and X hours per week cautioning the children to do the chores, and ensuring that your children do the chore properly. Here X > x.
Additional time for you: -((X-x)+y), where X>x and additionally y > 0.
> For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!
http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
https://www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/files/cont...
