[extropy-chat] 'Unskilled jobs to go in 10 years'

[Steve Davies]

Max M wrote

> Damien Broderick wrote:
>
> > The prediction is based on the growth in "outsourcing" manufacturing
> > and sales jobs abroad to economies where staff are hired at a fraction
> > of the cost.
>
>
> A cannot really see anything good about outsourcing. Shure we can get
> stuff cheaper. But it is acheived by people working for less money. Not
> by people working more efficiently. So it is a net loss.

Not at all. It's done by people working for less money than those they
replace doing the same or similar work, true. However (a) The people who do
the replacing are more productive and earning more than they did before, and
(b) all the empirical evidence shows that the people who are replaced will
move into areas where they have comparable or higher incomes than they did
before. (This is clearly the case here in the UK for example). Overall on a
global scale productivity per capita and therefore total wealth will
increase. The  problem is the social costs of adjusting to change and the
challenge is to develop means of minimising those. Opposition to outsourcing
is essentially opposition to economic change. Also you have to ask in what
way is a job moving from e.g. New York to Florida different from that job
moving to Bangalore? Economically there's no difference whatever.
>
> Furthermore if we "rationalise" by using cheaper labor we will not get
> the benefits of automation, as there will be less motivation to automate.

Not true, it means the incentive is to automate other kinds of work.

SD