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Last week Allan Sheahan published a piece arguing that \u201cJobs Are Not the Answer\u201d to America\u2019s unemployment problem. Here\u2019s his reasoning:<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThe current unemployment rate of 7.5% percent means close to 20 million Americans remain unemployed or underemployed. Nobody states the obvious truth: that the marketplace has changed and there will never again be enough jobs for everyone who wants one \u2014 no matter who is in the White House or in Congress. Fifty years ago, economists predicted that automation and technology would displace thousands of workers a year. Now we even have robots doing human work. Job losses will only get worse as the 21st century progresses.\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n In fact, economists have recognized this possibility since at least the early 19th<\/sup> century, when David Ricardo posed it as \u201cthe machine problem.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cRobots\u201d have been doing \u201chuman work\u201d since the time of Adam Smith\u2019s pin factory. Or, indeed, since the first proto-human discovered the fulcrum and lever so that one could do the work of four.<\/span><\/p>\n However, \u201cunemployment\u201d has existed only since the development of production for market. Our tribal ancestors \u201cworked\u201d about a dozen hours a week to provide the food, clothing, and shelter required for the standard of life they deemed acceptable. They occupied themselves the rest of the time with all the other human activities that we regard as \u201cculture\u201d: dancing, singing, tattooing, shaman-ing, piercing, ritualizing sacrifices, child rearing, storytelling, marrying, fighting, debating, drawing, and thinking.<\/span><\/p>\n Neither were our peasant forebearers, who had access to the main means of production\u2014agricultural land\u2014unemployed. They might have worked much longer days, and they grudgingly turned over an ever-rising portion of their production to rapacious feudal lords, but they were not unemployed. It is only once they lost access to land through enclosures, etc, that their livelihood depended on the whims of the employing class.<\/span><\/p>\n Why didn\u2019t the inexorable trend to greater use of \u201crobots\u201d from the time of Smith forward lead to the dis-employment of all (or most all) human labor? First we raised living standards (arguably, of course, since it is not altogether clear that we live better than our tribal cousins in all important respects), always finding other ways to employ humans to produce products that our ancient ancestors never knew they needed. Second, we reduced the workweek\u2014adding \u201cweekends\u201d and \u201cholidays,\u201d and reducing the daily grind from 16 hours to 12, and hence to 10 and finally 8. And there it got stuck\u2014at least in America.<\/span><\/p>\n Further, being a Puritanical\/Calvinist sort, Americans really never embraced the idea of vacations, anyway, and so unlike every other civilized society on earth, there is no considered right to a vacation and most Americans either don\u2019t get them or don\u2019t want them.<\/span><\/p>\n In recent years, it seems that involuntary unemployment and underemployment in the US has been rising. There are a number of reasons. First, the really lousy jobs have left the country and headed to developing nations like India, China, and Vietnam. For reasons that escape me, many of my progressive friends want to bring them back. Somehow they\u2019ve idealized life in the factory (one suspects because they\u2019ve never read Dickens or Marx, nor actually done manufacturing work, and apparently slept through the history lectures on the Lawrence, MA fire at the Pemberton Mill factory: According to the Boston Globe<\/span><\/i><\/a>: The scene after the fall was one of indescribable horror. Hundreds of men, women, and children were buried in the ruins. Some assured their friends that they were uninjured, but imprisoned by the timbers upon and about them. Others were dying and dead. Every nerve was strained to relieve the poor unfortunates, when, sad to relate, a lantern broke and set fire to the wreck. In a few moments the ruins were a sheet of flames. Fourteen are known to have been burned to death in the sight of their loved ones, who were powerless to aid them.<\/i>)<\/span><\/p>\n No matter how often one reads about fires or structural collapses in Asia that kill hundreds of workers at a time behind locked factory doors, our progressives want to bring back those \u201cgood jobs\u201d to America.<\/span><\/p>\n At the same time, they disparage the kind of work done by the vast majority of workers in all rich, developed, capitalist societies: services. These jobs come in all shapes and sizes: personal, financial, customer, educational, health care, entertainment, and insurance. They are the jobs of the past, the present, and the future but are forgotten or denigrated by progressives who pine for the days when American workers serviced machines.<\/span><\/p>\n Some of those service sector jobs will be taken by robots, others will be lost to increased productivity. It is inevitable, of course.<\/span><\/p>\n I saw in the news that the prostitutes of the future will be robots. I\u2019m not sure what to think of that development, but it is probably inevitable and will displace a lot of human workers. (Will future progressives bemoan the loss?)<\/span><\/p>\n My own profession\u2014education\u2014will almost certainly see technological displacement as we increasingly use \u201con-line\u201d and \u201cdistance learning\u201d methods to reach greater numbers of students. Doctors are already doing diagnosis and even providing care at a distance, and robots will soon enough do the delicate procedures at the operating table that are too difficult for even well-trained human hands.<\/span><\/p>\n Again, I do not know whether it is better to have a robot\u2019s digits exploring body cavities, but it is going to happen.<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019ve focused on the advanced economies, but the same thing is happening everywhere. Unemployment globally had already reached a record high before the GFC hit in 2008. Chinese manufacturing employment will soon begin to trend downward at a rate that will make USA factory job losses look trivial. The truth is that global demand for manufactured products cannot possibly be high enough to support more than a relatively small proportion of global jobs (much like agriculture before it).<\/span><\/p>\n Like it or not, humans everywhere will rely mostly on the service sector for paid employment. I like to joke that we\u2019ll all be in one of the \u201cP\u201d jobs: performance, personal care, politics, or prostitution. \u00a0Maybe that\u2019s really only three categories since members of the third can be combined with the first or last.<\/span><\/p>\n And\u2014who knows\u2014maybe the best comics and magicians and preachers of the future will be robots. I already suspect that most comments provided to blogs are submitted by robots\u2014a hunch strengthened by a recent stunt perpetrated by Brad DeLong (who programmed a \u201csub-turing robot\u201d to harass David Graeber; \u00a0see here<\/span><\/a>)<\/span><\/p>\n Indeed, note that all the tribal \u201ccultural\u201d activities that I listed above that were created to occupy time are now respectable and paid professions: dancing, singing, tattooing, piercing, ritualizing, child rearing, storytelling, marrying, fighting, debating, drawing, and thinking. Add accounting, banking, and marketing and you\u2019ve pretty much identified the whole damned service sector. The difference from tribal (and other pre-capitalist) societies is that we moved to what economists from Marx to Veblen and through to Keynes called a \u201cmonetary production economy\u201d\u2014one in which much of the provisioning process is undertaken using money with a view to make \u201cmore money\u201d (for the technically trained, that is M-C-P-C\u2019-M\u2019).<\/span><\/p>\n By no means should this be taken to mean that all production is monetary\u2014most kids do not pay their parents for child care (yet)\u2014but much of it is, and increasingly we have brought more of our provisioning activities into the market. While it is true that we also provide many of those activities through government, those, too, involve money. Indeed, I\u2019ve argued that the monetary system was created to mobilize resources for the \u201cpublic purpose\u201d\u2014but we need not go into that.<\/span><\/p>\n The important point is that our modern government uses the monetary system to mobilize resources (think national security) or to ensure access to them (think Social Security and Medicare). (Of course, we can consume some publicly provided resources\u2014such as parks\u2014without paying fees, but generally the state has directly or indirectly paid the wages required for upkeep.)<\/span><\/p>\n And, if it really should be the case that robots take away even our service sector jobs, then the answer (of course) is to reduce the work week\u2014to share the work that living humans can contribute toward production.<\/span><\/p>\n In a capitalist society, access to many of the resources needed for the good life requires money, and access to money is linked to employment. Neither of these is a one-to-one correspondence, of course. To a greater or lesser degree, we \u201ctake care of our own\u201d even when they do not have money or jobs. Still, there is an expectation that healthy people of appropriate ages \u201cwork for a living.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n As I said before on this blog, when discussing a \u201cnew meme for money,\u201d we expect that those who are able to do so will \u201cpay for\u201d their own support. Everyone knows what \u201cpay for\u201d means\u2014we all go to the shopping mall, and we pull out our wallets to \u201cpay for\u201d the Gucci handbag. You do not grab the bag and look around for someone else to pay. \u201cHey bro\u2019, I\u2019m a bit short today; can you spare a few hundred to buy this for me?\u201d No, if you cannot afford the Gucci you buy the Wal-Mart store brand made in China. It does little good to argue that those who can \u201cafford\u201d to pay more ought to do so for the benefit of those who need welfare. That is what the charity meme is for. Of course we all ought to give to charity\u2014from each according to ability to each according to need. If the tax system comes down to charitable contributions, then it should be based on voluntary contributions. \u00a0The mixing of these memes will at best lead to confusion, but more predictably it will lead to tax revolt and social spending cuts.<\/span><\/p>\n So here\u2019s the strange reaction of Allan Sheahan to the observation that we\u2019ve got \u201cgrowth without sufficient jobs,\u201d not only at the USA level but also at the global level: we don\u2019t need no more stinking jobs. He says:<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cJob creation is a completely wrong approach because the world doesn\u2019t need everyone to have a job in order to produce what is needed for us to live a decent, comfortable life. We need to re-think the whole concept of having a job. When we say we need more jobs, what we really mean is we need is more money to live on. One answer is to establish a basic income guarantee (BIG), enough at least to get by on \u2014 just above the poverty level \u2014 for everyone. Each of us could then try to find work to earn more.\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n