A couple economic ideas to decrease unemployment

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(1) Minimize the use of machines for automation, so that people can build things on assembly lines and otherwise have the jobs back that machines have taken.

(2) Provide tax benefits to companies that increase with the amount of employees they employ.

Any thoughts?

This decreases unemployment at the cost of decreasing production. When more labor is required for the same output, that means less of the population is free to work on other things. By the same reasoning, we could have full employment by going back to subsistence agriculture.


Wouldn't this favor mega-corporations over small businesses?


I think you would find [i]Player Piano[/] by Kurt Vonnegut very interesting. It is based on the fear that automation of production would leave the vast majority of the population unemployed.

That is true the machines increase production and general profit for the company, but I would rather a company make less profit than have people having no income or income from the state alone.

Farming is something that could become very "green" if they were to cut the use of machines out and hire people to do the planting and harvesting. It wouldn't be subsistence any more than it was a couple hundred years ago, but it would give jobless people work.



Yeah, maybe that wouldn't be such a good idea, it would need revision.

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Asimov had some similar things said in his Daniel Olivaw books too.

My general reply is that you suggest low productivity and inefficiency as a cure for what ails us.

To (1), issue trowels to road construction workers and have them dig roads with their trowels.

To (2), that is what the government does. Stack up warm bodies. Will a high warm body count increase productivity? Not likely

ruveyn

Productivity is already down due to demand being down.

The only things that some countries are offering is subsidised pay for only working part of the week. This isn’t to take on new employees, and doesn't mean they can't get rid of them.

There is a myth about machines replacing people. So far as the happened it happened a long, long time ago. There real issue is manufacturing jobs are now in china, which you have no control over.

Distinguish between production and productivity. Production is how much is produced in aggregate. Productivity is the ratio of what is produced to the amount of labor necessary to produce it. One can have high productivity and low production. One can have high production and low productivity.

ruveyn

The machines don't only increase profit for the company. They produce economic wealth. They make possible a higher standard of living that you and I enjoy. They free up resources to be devoted to other pursuits. The difficulty becomes transitioning people into new work, but what I've read suggests that there are no long-term effects on employment from machine labor replacing human labor- just temporary effects. So I don't think getting rid of machine production would decrease unemployment so much as it would just lower living standards.

I have to agree with Orwell's view upon things. Machinery creates greater wealth for society, which allows us to have the really cool things rather than crappier things. I mean, what you promote is just the less efficient division of labor, and it is something that really does not make much sense to economists at all.

In any case, here are my problems:

1) You could have said the same thing during the industrial revolution. Here's the problem, without that change we would be really freaking poor. If invoking your change then would be horrific to our economic state, then I do not see why it would be less horrific now. Particularly given that society SURVIVED that change, and went on to become wealthier.

2) In the long run, it probably would not decrease unemployment. The reason being that you have not provided evidence that society has changed it's natural rate of unemployment(the level of unemployment of society that is healthy), because of that, your change is likely to do nothing at all but increase inefficiency.

3) If production here becomes dramatically less efficient, as your plan seeks for it, then why wouldn't more just move away and go somewhere else? I mean, if anything, your plan should push for manufacturing to become less employable. You may have addressed that in your second point, and I will address the coherence of points when I get there.

As for tax benefits for increasing the number of employees used, well, that isn't a horrible idea for increasing employment, especially during a recessionary period, but it still does not throw out my problem #3. The major issue involved here is to make sure that this system cannot be abused in any fashion.

The problem boils down to low demand because people don't have the money to spend. There is no sense in producing for a market that doesn't exist, no matter how many workers produce it. If you use workers instead of machines you have to pay more for labor and the price of goods goes up to destroy demand. What is needed is some way for labor to get money to buy the goods so that industry can sell them without raising prices.

My thought is generally for terms of changing agriculture from diesel powered machine to manual labor, but to address the point that people can't afford so many produced items: people without work tend not to be able to spend as much.

(1)Most assembly work is just as labor-intensive as it was in the 1920s. The only difference is it's done in China or Mexico instead of the US. Tomorrow India.
(2)This is already done on a huge scale, both by US states and many countries.

No one wants to face up to it, but the world is vastly over-populated-not in terms of how many can be fed, but in terms of how many people are needed to run the show. The modern world no longer needs armies of peasants, laborers or factory workers. Or actual armies of conscripts soldiers. No amount of 're-training' or tax-breaks or luddite schemes will make a dent in structural unemployment. Places like Manchester and Detroit (let alone East Germany) will never recover, no matter how much money the government pours into them; it's just a matter of crowd control.

Meanwhile, the much ballyhooed service/consumer/finance economy (loaning money to people who can't pay it back to buy things they don't need) has gone kaput-though it still has its advocates, I see. The idea that large portions of mankind are simply economically superfluous is too horrifying for most people to admit. Aside from Vonnegut and a few other science fiction writers, few people are willing confront the possibility.

Personally, I'd rather suggest...

1. Reduce the cost of bare essentials (bread, milk, chocolate - well, perhaps not chocolate)

2. Make it illegal to work more than 30 hours per week (thus making jobs into jobshares).

3. Don't reduce wages even though you're reducing hours - since lots of people have loans...

4. Obtain "free" money somehow - that's the real problem - since goods cost less and people cost the same but work less (essentially, people cost more), there needs to be another income source for corporations. I don't have any idea where this could be.

Yes we could increase "employment" by providing 3rd world back breaking labor and a tyranical government telling people to behave. We could also draft the entire population, declare war on someone, bomb that someone to the stone age, and then rebuild their land... economic productivity! Or we could all walk around with baseball bats and break every glass window, street sign, and car we see because it will increase the "employment" and demand for things. It is counter productive and useless to dig holes, fill holes, and dig the hole again.

These are common economic fallacies. I think good economic thought is actually kind of counter intuitve in a way. Production is real wealth, production is real economics, everything else is just smoke and mirror

If we could get a couple of jobs where people could cut lawns with nail scissors, we could surely make unemployment drop.

Damn, beat me to the punch.

Lol, someone had to throw in a broken window some where.