John Quiggin — A Green New Deal?

In the specific context of a Green New Deal, the most important demand should be a reduction in working hours, with no offsetting change in wages. That amounts to taking the benefits of increased productivity, and progressive redistribution, in the form of increased leisure rather than increased consumption. It goes along with research findings suggesting that experiences, rather than material goods, are a better source of lasting happiness. To make the argument work completely, we need the further proviso that experiences arising from participation in family and community activities are more genuine than those offered by commercial providers such as tourism operators. I’d be interested to know if there is evidence on this point.

Absolutely.

John Quiggin's Blog
A Green New Deal?
John Quiggin | Professor and an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow at the University of Queensland, and a member of the Board of the Climate Change Authority of the Australian Government

Caleb Maupin — Technology & The Marxism of Jack Ma

Technological innovation increases productivity, decreasing the need for human work and increasing the opportunity for leisure.

It's a distribution issue.

The problem is that under capitalism, gains are capitalized and losses are socialized.

Under socialism, gains are socialized and losses are minimized.

Who is going to win this race, those aiming at the top or those racing to the bottom?

NEO
Technology & The Marxism of Jack Ma

Caleb Maupin

David F. Ruccio — Technology, employment, and distribution

I can make the case that things would be much better if the adoption of new technologies did in fact displace a large number of labor hours. Then, the decreasing amount of labor that needed to be performed could be spread among all workers, thus lessening the need for everyone to work as many hours as they do today.

But that would require a radically different set of economic institutions, one in which people were not forced to have the freedom to sell their ability to work to someone else. However, that’s not a world Autor and Salomons—or mainstream economists generally—can ever imagine let alone work to create.

Technological innovation increases the potential to substitute leisure for work, but that is ruled out institutionally and operationally in a capitalist system operated on wage labor. Rather than increasing leisure the gain from increased productivity goes to owners of technology and technology workers. This puts downward pressure on other workers and increases unemployment in less desirable work. The result is increasing inequality and social dysfunction.

Occasional Links & Commentary
Technology, employment, and distribution
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics, University of Notre Dame

Scott Ferguson — re: f@ck work (arcade)

James Livingston has responded to my critique of his Aeon essay, “Fuck Work.” His response was published in the Spanish magazine Contexto y Accion. One can find an English translation here.

Arcade has now published my reply.

the unheard of center — critique after modern monetary theory

re: f@ck work (arcade)
Scott Ferguson | Assistant Professor of Film & Media Studies, Department of Humanities & Cultural Studies at the University of South Florida, and a Research Scholar at the Binzagr Institute for Sustainable Prosperity

Scott Ferguson — f@ck work: a rejoinder

Looks like a blog debate in the works about work.

The following is a brief rejoinder to James Livingston’s “Fuck Work,” an essay based on his book, No More Work: Why Full Employment is a Bad Idea (2016). Specifically, it answers Aeon Magazine’s tagline for Livingston’s piece, “What if jobs are not the solution, but the problem?”

What if we stopped believing that capitalists and automation are responsible for determining how and when we labor together? What if we quit imagining that so-called “leisure” spontaneously organizes itself like the laissez-faire markets we elsewhere decry?

This is of the essence of it. Humans construct social worlds largely based on language in ways that no other animal species area remotely capable of doing. Not only is language use  the chief tool in social construction but it also solidifies that construction and transmits it across generations relatively intact owing to culture and institutions.

But language does change over time and adapts to human response to changing conditions. In this way, language use continues to be emergent.

Terms like "work" and "leisure" are embedded in social contexts that give them meaning in specific situations. As context changes, terms adapt to the shifts, sometime subtly in a nuanced way, while at other times drastically, as it the coining of new terms to handle fresh context.

In addition, the human historical dialectal itself also impacts word use as people realize that they are being influenced by particular contextual usage that could be improved upon, for example, by shifting the norms associated with the context.

What if we predicated social critique on terms that are not defined by the neoliberal ideology that we wish to circumvent?

What if we made a federal Job Guarantee the basis for a renewed leftist imaginary?

the unheard-of center — critique after modern monetary theory
f@ck work: a rejoinder

Scott Ferguson

James Livingston — Fuck Work

Revisiting our attitude toward work and our dependence on it. What happens when it goes away?

Aeon
Fuck Work
James Livingston | Professor of History at Rutgers University in New York

Sandwichman — Post Post Work Post

What Karl Marx really meant. And therefore why most of what goes by the name "economics" is a crock. It's actually a story gussied up in math that is used to dupe the rubes.

EconoSpeak

Post Post Work Post
Sandwichman

Branko Milanovic — No one would be unemployed and no one would hold a job

Several days ago Steven Hill presented at the Graduate Center CUNY in New York his new book “Raw Deal: How the ‘Uber Economy’ and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers”. It discusses (according to Steven’s presentation; I have not read the book yet) the decline of trade unions, the future of jobs and robotics. It struck me that there are (In his presentation as well as in most of what we read), when it comes to the future of work, two narratives that often seem contradictory. There is a narrative of job-automatization and robotics whereby most of our jobs end up taken by the robots. Then there is a narrative of people working more and more hours as work intrudes into their leisure time: instead of taking it easy throughout the day as the first narrative implies, we would use our “free” time to rent apartments we own or drive our cars as taxis. According to the first narrative, we are in danger of having too much leisure time; according to the second, of having none.

Let’s consider the two scenarios in turn, and separately.…

But perhaps it may be better to think of the two scenarios as just one scenario that would combine lots of labor substitution with heavy segmentation of tasks (and much more intense labor discipline made possible thanks to automation). In that case, jobs to which we have become accustomed would cease to exist: lots of today’s functions will be automated, and for many others, “amateurs”, not professionals, would do them.… 

Global Inequality
No one would be unemployed and no one would hold a job
Branko Milanovic | Visiting Presidential Professor at City University of New York Graduate Center and senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), and formerly lead economist in the World Bank's research department and senior associate at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

William H. David — The Internet Has Been a Colossal Economic Disappointment

This gets it backwards. The purpose of technological innovation is not to create jobs but to increase productivity, which generally means replacing jobs and making space for increased leisure. 

Technological innovation increase makes work obsolete. This has been the historical result of technological innovation. 

If there is a problem, it's with distribution of increasing surplus in order to increase shared prosperity.

Harvard Business Review — HBR Blog Network

The Internet Has Been a Colossal Economic Disappointment
William H. Davidow | Mohr Davidow Ventures

Brian Merchant — On the Far Horizon: Fully Automated Luxury Communism Brian Merchant

Thinking ahead.

Bastani and fellow luxury communists believe that this era of rapid change is an opportunity to realise a post-work society, where machines do the heavy lifting not for profit but for the people.

SolidarityEconomy
On the Far Horizon: Fully Automated Luxury Communism

Brian Merchant
SolidarityEconomy.net via The Guardian /UK

Henry Blodget — The Sum Total Of Human Progress Over The Past 150 Years Is Revealed In These 2 Charts

150 years ago, we spent about 70 of those 112 waking hours working (63%). 

Thanks to the remarkable productivity enhancements we have made over the past 150 years, however, we have reduced the average workweek in most countries by about 30 hours, to 40 hours (34% of waking hours)…. 

This has freed up a lot of extra time. 

So what do we do with all the extra hours our miraculous progress and productivity enhancements have allowed us to create for ourselves? 

We spend them watching television.

The boob tube rules, literally. Now being replaced among digital natives with gadgets.

Business Insider

The Sum Total Of Human Progress Over The Past 150 Years Is Revealed In These 2 Charts

Henry Blodget

Daniel Little — Marx's thinking about technology

One interesting factoid: Capital's falling rate of profit was Engels editing rather than Marx. There's more.

Understanding Society
Marx's thinking about technology

Daniel Little | Chancellor, University of Michigan at Dearborn

Randy Wray —Are More Jobs The Answer? The “BIG” Bait and Switch

More on the basic income guarantee (BIG) versus the job guarantee (JG).

Economonitor — Great Leap Forward
Are More Jobs The Answer? The “BIG” Bait and Switch
L. Randall Wray | Professor of Economics, UMKC

The Current Moment — The Future of Work

Although every so often there are breathless declarations of the end of work, the collapse of work, and that technology is leading to a world without work, the historical trend is the opposite. Ever since the 1970s, an increasing share of the population has been working. For instance, the graph below shows the employment to population ratio in the United States. Notably, even after the dramatic post-2008 decline, a higher percentage of Americans still work in the formal labor market than anytime before the mid 1970s....

Three recent changes to the political economy suggest not only increased participation in, but greater dependence on, wage-labor, especially by those on the bottom end of the labor market. These are a) stagnation or reduction of welfare benefits, b) stagnation or decline of wealth and c) stagnant wages and precarious employment. Welfare and wealth are alternatives to wages as sources of consumption; lower wages and precarious employment increases insecurity of and need for employment....

In all, then, we can say that alternatives to employment have gotten worse or disappeared for the majority of people in the US and Europe, while the available jobs pay, on average, less than they used to and offer less security. There is every reason to think that the most likely near future of work will give us strong reasons to think about a different way of organizing work – about a better, if less likely, future. 

The Current Moment
The Future of Work

Peter Cooper — Inner Growth Requires Time to Self Reflect

I would say that in the area of economics I have only ever had three light-bulb moments : perceiving the source of surplus value (Marx) ; encountering the principle of effective demand (Kalecki, Keynes) ; and understanding the implications of monetary sovereignty (MMT). Each of these insights had a big impact on me and made sense of a lot of other things all at once.

In thinking about paths to a better society, the understanding of monetary sovereignty seems the most important of the insights. It makes clear that real resources are the only genuine constraint and that, regardless of what capitalists or ‘bond vigilantes’ might think of the matter, economic activity need not be for profit, growth is not compulsory, materialism is not the only alternative, and the wage-labor relation or income tied to labor time is not a law of nature. None of these things are necessary or inevitable for a monetarily sovereign society, if we so choose.

But what will we choose? Do we even know what we really want? As regular commentator jrbarch often points out most eloquently, to know what we really want, we have to know ourselves. Light-bulb moments in our inner lives require self-reflection.

heteconomist.com
Inner Growth Requires Time to Self Reflect
Peter Cooper

Robert Skidelsky — Rise of the robots: what will the future of work look like?

If one machine can cut necessary human labour by half, why make half of the workforce redundant, rather than employing the same number for half the time? Why not take advantage of automation to reduce the average working week from 40 hours to 30, and then to 20, and then to 10, with each diminishing block of labour time counting as a full time job? This would be possible if the gains from automation were not mostly seized by the rich and powerful, but were distributed fairly instead.

Rather than try to repel the advance of the machine, which is all that the Luddites could imagine, we should prepare for a future of more leisure, which automation makes possible. But, to do that, we first need a revolution in social thinking.

The Guardian (UK)
Rise of the robots: what will the future of work look like?
Robert Skidelsky

(h/t Kevin Fathi via email)

Izabella Kaminska — The Tech Debate Blasts Off (A Linkfest)

Links, links, links, and some good commentary, too.

Toward a Leisure Society
The Tech Debate Blasts Off (A Linkfest)
Izabella Kaminska

More on automation, robotics, technology, innovation, employment, work, and leisure

Magpie's Asymmetric Warfare
Krugman, Robots and Exchange Value
Magpie

Heteconomist
Another Take on Robots, in Light of Marx and the TSSI
Peter Cooper

Toward a Leisure Society
An Email Dialogue With Tim Worstall (Warning:Long)
Izabella Kaminska

Global Robotic Future

Until recently, we have been hearing about the Great Leveling (of wages) as global labor becomes increasingly fungible. Now it is looking increasingly like workers are going to be going the way of the dodo as robots replace them.

Modern capitalism is based on innovation, and innovation, where means increased productivity. Japan and Germany are the productivity champions and run export economies. Is it because their workers work either harder or smarter, or because they have deployed more robots and have become more highly automated than other countries.

China still ranks low on the global robotic hierarchy, according to the state-run China Daily. Last year there were 21 robots for every 10,000 workers in China, compared with a global average of 55. Japan has 339 robots for every 10,000 workers; Germany has 251.

The Chinese apparently get that this is the emerging trend.

This is changing. The Taiwanese manufacturing giant Foxconn has revealed plans to boost its fleet of industrial robots from 10,000 to 1m within three years. According to the company’s CEO, Terry Gou, robots will replace workers for tasks such as spraying, assembling and welding.

This is a development to be welcomed, since the first tasks to be robotized are those repetitive, mechanical tasks that are dehumanizing and the dirty tasks that only the disadvantaged can be persuaded to do.

This presents a tremendous opportunity for increased leisure, not just "hanging out" or "going fishing," but also more significantly for self-actualization and the creative development of an increasingly global civilization in which humans live unity and celebrate diversity.

However, this will require a revisiting of our whole concept of work and leisure and a fundamental restructuring of political economy.

The Raw Story
Chinese demand for robots increases as labor costs rise
The Guardian

Marshall Brain — Robotic Freedom

Longish but a good analysis of what to expect in the robotic revolution that is already underway. It's relevant to the discussion of a JG/ELR and the overall MMT macroanalysis, too, since there are going to be more unemployed people as automation increases — millions of them.

Read it at MarshallBrain.com
Robotic Freedom
[Part 3 of the Robotic Nation series]
by Marshall Brain
(h/t Trixie in the comments at heteconomist.com)