25 years old and deep in debt

[Ideologue]

Is this the thread where we talked about how automation is going to eliminate all the jobs?

I got an interesting perspective on that. I've been given the opportunity / conned into doing some "heritage" work for my company's accounting group. I went through some of the financial disclosures back from 1919-1940, and where now some companies have hundreds of pages of highly detailed stuff supplemented by a bunch of references to other disclosures, the disclosures back then were often 4 pages: 1 of which was a general statement on the business by management, and 1 was a statement by the external auditor saying things were all good.

Then I interviewed a person who started in about 1980 about how a large company would consolidate pre internet & pre computers for everyone. The process was so manual that just getting the basics that we report today would be exceedingly difficult if not impossible--but still much of the technology used wasn't available in 1930, and the disclosures were much more.

The point being that if you were an accountant in 1920, probably most of your daily work would be automated by 1980, and most of what was done in 1980 has been automated today. But because the volume and quality of reported items has significantly increased, I would guess that the size of accounting departments has also increased.

Indeed.  That's basically why my job exists--in 1970, when all documents were paper, you might've had actual attys going through it, costing more per hour, but they were going through 100,000 pages rather than ten million (9,900,000 of which are only responsive due to judges' unwillingness to hold a discovery request for "all documents discussing ____" as burdensome, even though it totally is.

That's why Joan and I argue about this.  I foresee a time where the growth in work for humans stops.  He doesn't.

I made a totally bogus essay about the humanistic reasons why I wanted to be a screenwriter and the life-changing moments that put me on that path.

Ugh, okay, Francois.  Did you have an unhappy childhood too?

[Syt]

Does the SEC at least get an electronic version to work off of?

The Big 10 demands it be delivered in triplicate using carbon paper though.

[celedhring]

Ugh, okay, Francois.  Did you have an unhappy childhood too?

No, I played the Cinema Paradiso card here.

I remember that a couple years after I joined there was a security failure at our faculty and some of the admission dossiers got leaked. I was terrified to death ANYBODY could read the absolute pile of schmaltzy pretentious shit I wrote and - even worse - thought I meant any of it.

[Valmy]

Does the SEC at least get an electronic version to work off of?

The Big 10 demands it be delivered in triplicate using carbon paper though.

Big 12 doesn't, but accuses everyone of cheating.

Bah he was attacking the NCAA.  Besides stop talking trash to your own conference 

[Baron von Schtinkenbutt]

Is this the thread where we talked about how automation is going to eliminate all the jobs?

I got an interesting perspective on that. I've been given the opportunity / conned into doing some "heritage" work for my company's accounting group. I went through some of the financial disclosures back from 1919-1940, and where now some companies have hundreds of pages of highly detailed stuff supplemented by a bunch of references to other disclosures, the disclosures back then were often 4 pages: 1 of which was a general statement on the business by management, and 1 was a statement by the external auditor saying things were all good.

Then I interviewed a person who started in about 1980 about how a large company would consolidate pre internet & pre computers for everyone. The process was so manual that just getting the basics that we report today would be exceedingly difficult if not impossible--but still much of the technology used wasn't available in 1930, and the disclosures were much more.

The point being that if you were an accountant in 1920, probably most of your daily work would be automated by 1980, and most of what was done in 1980 has been automated today. But because the volume and quality of reported items has significantly increased, I would guess that the size of accounting departments has also increased.

Indeed.  That's basically why my job exists--in 1970, when all documents were paper, you might've had actual attys going through it, costing more per hour, but they were going through 100,000 pages rather than ten million (9,900,000 of which are only responsive due to judges' unwillingness to hold a discovery request for "all documents discussing ____" as burdensome, even though it totally is.

That's why Joan and I argue about this.  I foresee a time where the growth in work for humans stops.  He doesn't.

What you don't recognize is that technology is part of the reason the number of pages involved in discoveries has jumped by orders of magnitude.  It is much easier to create, store, index, and retrieve documents than ever before.  Thus, more documents and better ways to identify relevant documents.  So now we have people to filter the 10,000,000 page mess down to the 100,000 pages the attorneys would have started with 40 years ago.

The foreseen and unforeseen effects of technology create whole classes of jobs, often more than they destroy.

[The Minsky Moment]

That's why Joan and I argue about this.  I foresee a time where the growth in work for humans stops.  He doesn't.

Your view has a very respectable intellectual heritage.  Marx argued it.  Keynes argued it.  (they were both optimistic about it though).
Problem was their predictions didn't come true.  It's not because they over-stated future technical progress either - in fact Marx probably under-predicted that.  It is because of two causes:

(1) the nature of human wants differed from the either Marx or Keynes believed to the good life (the lesiured life of a post-Romantic  19th century German intellectual on the one hand, the leisured life of a Bloomsbury English intellectual on the other).  What Keynes tut-tutted as "intense, unsatisfied purposiveness" appears to be more ubiquitous and enduring than he had hoped.  As it turns out, quiet afternoons reading and smoking one's pipe don't satisfy everyone.
(2) the nature of work itself is constantly in flux.  Labor is not as Marx sometimes reductively conceived it, undifferentiated lumps of physical exertion over time.  The very concept of what people understand as market compensable labor changes over time.

It's always possible to argue "this time will be different".  My criticism is the same criticism I would and do make against all other variants of that argument in all other contexts - prove it and explain specifically why the now is so special.  Yes - sometimes this time is different.  Sometimes there is a true massive paradigmatic break in the "laws" that seem to govern human societies.  Agriculture was one.  The Industrial Revolution was another.  But those are rare occurences.  If we are in the process of such a massive shift in the fundamental nature of human production and distribution it certainly doesn't seem all that clear to me.  We are certainly still very far off from Siege's "singularity" where machine intelligence and motor planning can duplicate all human capabilities. 

[Eddie Teach]

Problem was their predictions didn't come true. 

But per capita the demand for human labor has markedly decreased. Standardized work weeks of 40 hours(and even less in some European countries today), end of child labor and longer periods of education before entering work force, retirement...

[The Minsky Moment]

But per capita the demand for human labor has markedly decreased.

I doubt that because against the trends you raise, there is the introduction of women to the work force (thus almost doubling demand per capita) and the fact that working lives are longer (many more people living into their 50s and 60s).

[The Brain]

But per capita the demand for human labor has markedly decreased.

I doubt that because against the trends you raise, there is the introduction of women to the work force (thus almost doubling demand per capita) and the fact that working lives are longer (many more people living into their 50s and 60s).

On behalf of women everywhere:

[Eddie Teach]

Women have always worked.

[The Minsky Moment]

Women have always worked.

Not for market wages.
You are making the same mistake that Berkut did earlier.
Of course technology is going to decrease the amount of physical exertion required, that's the whole point.
That has basically zero to do whether it will reduce "jobs" i.e. labor compensable in the market.

[Eddie Teach]

I'm not talking about child-rearing, I'm talking about tasks for which their compensation was subject to market forces, be it service, factory work, washing and mending people's clothes, working the fields, etc.

[The Minsky Moment]

I'm not talking about child-rearing, I'm talking about tasks for which their compensation was subject to market forces, be it service, factory work, washing and mending people's clothes, working the fields, etc.

That neither changes the analysis nor my response.
It's just another way of making that point that automation tends to broaden the extent of market compensable labor.

[Eddie Teach]

I'm not talking about child-rearing, I'm talking about tasks for which their compensation was subject to market forces, be it service, factory work, washing and mending people's clothes, working the fields, etc.

That neither changes the analysis nor my response.
It's just another way of making that point that automation tends to broaden the extent of market compensable labor.

No, it's a way of making the point that the work force didn't suddenly double 70 years ago and that working hours have actually decreased. Women may have been excluded from a large variety of jobs, but they still worked and their labor affected the labor market for men.


I don't think there's any debate that the labor market has broadened, the (quite open) question is whether the creation of new jobs keeps up with the destruction of old ones.

[The Brain]

They only lie sleeping.