The Great Resignation or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love No Job

I think people will figure it out. More importantly, I think companies will be forced to figure it out, in the sense that they pay a living wage for even menial service jobs.

You can only automate so much, and I think it will cause people to innovate and create new jobs for a newly freed up labour force.

 

We are not talking about changing skillsets.

We're talking about simply eliminating major sections of the labor market. It's not a question of buggy whip makers (or blacksmiths) having to move to another segment of industry, it's a question or what happens when most assembly and raw material transformation simply doesn't require human beings? Or the only human beings it does require are a small handful of highly skilled and trained computer and electronics engineers?

By and large, this kind of automation is not creating a new industry for people to move into. It's simply replacing skill sets that used to employ people.

I'm not saying we should slow down or stop it, but it is going to require a different view into how we view the labor market, and what it means to "earn a living."

 

That has happened, though, even if on a smaller scale. NASA and some companies used to employ “human computers.” Those were groups of people that worked out complex math problems. Now we have real computers for that. And entire labor fields have been completely eliminated over time. The blacksmith example wasn’t to show that skills are entirely transferable. The point is that there aren’t anymore commercial blacksmiths. But the alarmism on this concept assumes that the change will be immediate. Unless we remove the air gap from some game-changing AI, the economy will adjust* toward it in whatever way it needs to, otherwise what would be the point? Without consumers with disposable income, it won’t matter anyway. At some point, the dust will settle on it.

(*This refers to all applicable mechanisms, not some Adam Smith dogmatic finger-crossing.)

That said, to your last point, I agree, we need a new lens to even conceptualize it. I’m not sure what a post-scarcity/post-capitalist society would even look like or that our political climate could realistically adjust to it, regardless of employment levels.

 

I'm not trying to be alarmist; this will be a slow process and we will, by necessity, have to navigate it.

But your points about NASA or blacksmiths are missing what is happening - individual fields always have skills come and go.

Robotics are reaching a point, though, where the very idea of human beings doing repetitive, dextrous tasks may become obsolete. That's not a field or skillset changing; that's a basic way a large portion of humans have "earned a living" for as long as earning a living was a thing humans did.

 

I wasn't accusing you specifically of being alarmist, just that there seems to be a general (perhaps unfounded) alarmist about the issue. I agree that entire swaths of manual laborers will be out of work (permanently) in ways that have never been seen. I'm saying that it won't be as immediately critical as it's made out to be as an argument for something like UBI. I think UBI will eventually be necessary, but my main point is that the market tends to correct itself given a long enough period of time.

 

Well, I hope the job seeker job market helps out with hub's job search because he's about to lose it at his current one. Too bad he can't just quit because of, you know, money.

 

To someone working somewhere that makes them want to punch someone or break down.... a job that is affecting their health and making even their free time bitter....retirement sounds like permanent vacation.

There are definitely some people who live on ramen and budget to the penny to max out all possible retirement funds possible, with the plan of retiring early and continuing the lifestyle. You will find many on the FIRE subreddit.

 

The FI/RE concept is intriguing, but I don’t know if living on a shoestring budget for the rest of my life is worth not making any money at all.

 

Well Im going to be 37 in a few weeks and it seems Im way behind the 8 ball just glancing at that subreddit. Makes more sense if you got out of college with a good paying job and career field and just banked for 23-40. I did not do that. Also assume it's mostly childless people given the amount of question of how to achieve it with them. Depending on where you live banking 75-100k for 10-15 years with decent investments you could switch to some low stress part time job a few days a week.

Some big corps were already trending towards flex time and unlimited pto. A career as an identity is not what it used to be. I know seeing my dad die at 52 after decades of 3rd shift overtime (he lived to work) didnt pay off since he missed the time he could have been spending with his family.

 

My work did something similar for me. They shoved through a promotion that usually takes a while, and threw a bonus at me. They like me there, but it's a big enough company that that kind of HR stuff doesn't usually happen fast and the bonus was out of the blue. Clearly they're panicking a little.

I'm in the same boat. I don't know exactly when retirement is for me, but I know I won't be working when I'm 60. This is partly for real retirement purposes, and partly to ensure that I always maintain the ability to tell a shitty job to fuck off.

If you hang around those communities at all, you'll find a whole spectrum of people. They range from: "I live in my Honda Civic in the work parking lot and eat their free ramen noodles, I will retire at 30 and live on $21k/year for the rest of my life," (I mean, yay, but that hardly seems like a life?) to "I got a $400k/year job out of college and will retire at 35 with $4 million in the bank," (and again, yay, but that's not a plan most people can work with).

I'm moderate about it. I spend on things that bring happiness into my life (travel, photography), but I'm very careful to avoid sinking money into stuff outside of categories that make me happy. I've driven high mileage cars for a couple decades because I know a car is an appliance to me, not a source of enjoyment. When I get a raise, I usually reward myself with something, and then just bump up my savings percentage; my yearly expenses haven't changed much in 10 years despite 3 promotions and regular raises.

I have my own FI/RE plans but the point is that it's less about living on a shoestring and retiring before 40, and more about shifting your priorities to knock some years off your working life. Some people are more extreme than others, but man does it sound bleak to me to continue spending half or more of my available time working - and nearly all of my daylight hours - until I'm sixty-freaking-seven.