Continuations

NOTE: Today’s excerpt from World After Capital is about labor. In it I describe what I call the “job loop” and how it has become central to both the economy and sadly also our view of human dignity.LaborBefore we can get to attention, though, we need to discuss the changing role of labor in the economy. Thinking about labor is hard because of an odd interweaving of cultural beliefs with economic history that I will try to disentangle. Over the last couple hundred years we have convinced ourse...

Last Friday morning I appeared on a panel about the future of work. This is of course a topic I have covered extensively here on Continuations and is a central subject of my draft book World After Capital. One of the key recurring themes that I hear in this context is some version of “We just don’t know what’s going to happen.” This comes up for instance with regard to how quickly some jobs will be automated and where possible new jobs might come from in the future. This strikes me as a huge ...

Today we are celebrating Labor Day, a day that was originally started by Labor Unions in the early 1880s. At the time it was not a public holiday but rather took the form of a walkout demonstration or general strike. The demands were for shorter hours, safer work and higher pay. It has become easy and fashionable to be critical of unions but historically making labor more expensive was a key to success for Western economies. Why? Because making labor more expensive simultaneously resulted in ...

Yesterday I saw a funny cartoon about self driving cars by Scott Adams from the perspective of a robot with an attitude:When I discuss the impact of automation on the labor market I sometimes run into the argument that self driving cars are still years away and that there are a lot of edge cases to solve before they will replace human drivers. That argument makes it appear as if there was some distinct moment in the future where we finally say “hurrah, the self driving car is completely finis...

I took last week off from blogging for family reasons which means I sat out a big wave of posts about Uber. Don’t worry, I am not going to rehash that particular discussion. Instead, I want to point out what I believe the big questions are that should be asked of all companies in this sector which includes two USV investments (Hailo and Sidecar). Here are two questions: 1. Are drivers genuinely independent contractors? A legitimate concern here should be that the level of control that comes f...

Marc Andreessen recently wrote a post titled “This is Probably a Good Time to Say That I Don’t Believe Robots Will Eat All the Jobs …” – like all of Marc’s posts it is full of good ideas and worth reading. I agree with many of the points including the benefits of technology driven deflation and being long on human creativity to find interesting things for us to do. There is, however, a critical distribution question that Marc mostly avoids but is at the crux of the transition. Marc writes:Ima...

Last week I posted a draft outline for my planned book on “The Coming Information Age” with a proposed chapter on the “Unbundling of the Job.” This is an idea that first occurred to me when I attended a workshop at MIT on Work and Value in the Digital Economy at MIT in late 2012. At the time here is what I wrote:Do people need jobs or can we deliver what jobs provide some other way and in a potentially unbundled fashion? The “jobs of a job” include income, structure, social connections, meani...

Earlier this week I posted about production functions which must have felt very dry but I promise there is a payoff (terms defined in the previous post are linked). Let’s consider a production function with three factors: computers, skilled labor and unskilled labor. What we are interested in thinking about is what happens as the price of computers drops (since that’s what we have obviously observed dramatically over the last decades). Much of the literature seems to suggest that skilled labo...

The stock market indices are above their pre financial crisis highs. One interpretation of this is that the financial crisis was just that: a crisis of the financial sector that left the rest of the economy largely untouched. Another interpretation is that we are simply looking at the results of way too much cheap money provided by the Fed. The latter is supported by a chart that I saw yesterday for the first time which shows the Dow divided by the price of gold. That chart is essentially fla...