I’d genuinely be interested to know how many human beings need to work a 40-hour week in order to produce and distribute enough food, medicine, clothing, shelter and education for all 8.2 billion humans, and how many of the rest of us are really just building follies purely just to keep everyone busy.
If tech billionaires insist on continuing to make jobs like “taxi driver” and “checkout operator” obsolete via automation while also refusing to share the proceeds of that automation with the humans whose expertise was used to train said AI and then got replaced, then the question of “exactly how pointless do the new jobs (I mean, ‘influencer’? Really?) need to be before we accept that money has ceased to make sense as the way we incentivize people to not have more kids than the global industrial output can sustain?”.
You can have 80% of the population unemployed given the 20% are elite workers using automation and nearly perfect/efficient automated systems (i.e: Not farming by hand trowel, but one person controlling 10 combines/tractors simultaneously like they’re playing Factorio or Farming Simulator)
It depends a bit on what we need strictly necessary to keep people alive and happy. Also we probably only need people to work 6 hours days iirc, it would be the same efficiency.
Let’s assume there is no money and everybody gets what they need, like when we lived in smaller self sustainable communities.
We would need transport for a lot of things, we also need people to repair that infrastructure.
At the same time, we also need more people to do sports to keep healthy, so you need to be able to do that. You don’t strictly need a lot for that, but still.
We also need things like swimming pools on top of normal education to teach people how to swim (more important in some countries than others)
Don’t we also need some way for people to have hobbies etc to keep everybody sane and happy?
I like the thought process of how many people have essential jobs, this also started for me during covid when the Dutch government didn’t make concrete lists of what was essential.
I also don’t believe that we need more people on the planet, we need less people to help with climate change. Yes we will have issues with the ageing of people, but automation should help fill the gab with when those people retire.
Since 1970, productivity has increased by 86%. That suggests the output of a 40 hour work week in 1970 could be done in under 22 hours with the same inflation-adjusted wage. That’s not even considering the productivity increases caused by industrialization in the century before 1970 (though the 40 hour work week in the US wasn’t set until 1938).
Admittedly, this is a bit of a naive way of looking at the numbers, but it gives ballpark ideas of how far we might be able to go.
Note that real (inflation-adjusted) pay has only increased 32% in the same time period. This, BTW, is a much more robust argument than saying real pay has flatlined since 1970. Real wages are, in fact, up during that time period, but it’s possible the numbers will shift again over time and return to being flat or down. The pay-productivity gap, however, has only been widening with time and isn’t going to be fixed without drastic changes in policy.
I suppose first we should consider food. For that we look at what every human needs to consume (considering all necessary vitamins and minerals in addition to obvious calories) and then try to figure out what sources of those nutrients is currently the most efficient at producing them. Then there should be data somewhere on how much of that foodstuff is produced per year and how many people are employed in producing it. If not enough of that foodstuff is produced to meet the planet’s needs for that nutrient, then move on to the second-most efficient source and so on until the need is met. Then the same again for the next vital nutrient, hopefully with overlap on sources of previous nutrients. And so on until all nutrients are accounted for, and that should provide a number for how many people are directly involved in the production of the food. That would be the primary list. THEN we would need to consider secondary elements for food production: everyone involved in producing the tools/resources used in direct production (tractors, combine harvesters, fuel, fertilizer, etc), but ONLY calculating for JUST enough to meet the demand represented by the primary list. Surplus manufacturing to be ignored. Keep going that way until you have it all the way down to raw materials (steel, silicon, rubber, etc). Finally, you look at the distribution network necessary to actually get all of these things where they’re needed. This would, naturally, include workers employed at road maintenance, transport drivers (although billionaires seem fairly insistent that these jobs can be eliminated soon), etc. That would provide you with the BARE MINIMUM workers necessary for food production.
Then you perform a similar process for the production of:
Housing
Clothing
Healthcare
Education
Once you have the bare minimum, you can actually talk in concrete terms of just how much of humanity is employed in essential work and how much isn’t. Most likely, when evaluating clothing, the “most efficient source” was sweat shops, so once you know that humanity has enough non-essential workers, you can make a compelling case that laws need to be passed to guarantee that more workers are diverted to clothing production, with an aim of providing better working conditions for all.
We can’t really have intelligent conversations about whether capitalism is or isn’t a good way to allocate resources until we have the data on what the optiminal use would be. We all SAY that the world produces enough for everyone, but nobody really KNOWS.
I’d genuinely be interested to know how many human beings need to work a 40-hour week in order to produce and distribute enough food, medicine, clothing, shelter and education for all 8.2 billion humans, and how many of the rest of us are really just building follies purely just to keep everyone busy.
If tech billionaires insist on continuing to make jobs like “taxi driver” and “checkout operator” obsolete via automation while also refusing to share the proceeds of that automation with the humans whose expertise was used to train said AI and then got replaced, then the question of “exactly how pointless do the new jobs (I mean, ‘influencer’? Really?) need to be before we accept that money has ceased to make sense as the way we incentivize people to not have more kids than the global industrial output can sustain?”.
You’re thinking of garden hermits who often hang around follies.
And yes, most clerical offices and upper management dudes have them buzzing around them in swarms looking busy.
It’s about 20%, according to Ricardian Theorems.
You can have 80% of the population unemployed given the 20% are elite workers using automation and nearly perfect/efficient automated systems (i.e: Not farming by hand trowel, but one person controlling 10 combines/tractors simultaneously like they’re playing Factorio or Farming Simulator)
It depends a bit on what we need strictly necessary to keep people alive and happy. Also we probably only need people to work 6 hours days iirc, it would be the same efficiency. Let’s assume there is no money and everybody gets what they need, like when we lived in smaller self sustainable communities.
We would need transport for a lot of things, we also need people to repair that infrastructure. At the same time, we also need more people to do sports to keep healthy, so you need to be able to do that. You don’t strictly need a lot for that, but still. We also need things like swimming pools on top of normal education to teach people how to swim (more important in some countries than others)
Don’t we also need some way for people to have hobbies etc to keep everybody sane and happy?
I like the thought process of how many people have essential jobs, this also started for me during covid when the Dutch government didn’t make concrete lists of what was essential.
I also don’t believe that we need more people on the planet, we need less people to help with climate change. Yes we will have issues with the ageing of people, but automation should help fill the gab with when those people retire.
Since 1970, productivity has increased by 86%. That suggests the output of a 40 hour work week in 1970 could be done in under 22 hours with the same inflation-adjusted wage. That’s not even considering the productivity increases caused by industrialization in the century before 1970 (though the 40 hour work week in the US wasn’t set until 1938).
Admittedly, this is a bit of a naive way of looking at the numbers, but it gives ballpark ideas of how far we might be able to go.
Note that real (inflation-adjusted) pay has only increased 32% in the same time period. This, BTW, is a much more robust argument than saying real pay has flatlined since 1970. Real wages are, in fact, up during that time period, but it’s possible the numbers will shift again over time and return to being flat or down. The pay-productivity gap, however, has only been widening with time and isn’t going to be fixed without drastic changes in policy.
I suppose first we should consider food. For that we look at what every human needs to consume (considering all necessary vitamins and minerals in addition to obvious calories) and then try to figure out what sources of those nutrients is currently the most efficient at producing them. Then there should be data somewhere on how much of that foodstuff is produced per year and how many people are employed in producing it. If not enough of that foodstuff is produced to meet the planet’s needs for that nutrient, then move on to the second-most efficient source and so on until the need is met. Then the same again for the next vital nutrient, hopefully with overlap on sources of previous nutrients. And so on until all nutrients are accounted for, and that should provide a number for how many people are directly involved in the production of the food. That would be the primary list. THEN we would need to consider secondary elements for food production: everyone involved in producing the tools/resources used in direct production (tractors, combine harvesters, fuel, fertilizer, etc), but ONLY calculating for JUST enough to meet the demand represented by the primary list. Surplus manufacturing to be ignored. Keep going that way until you have it all the way down to raw materials (steel, silicon, rubber, etc). Finally, you look at the distribution network necessary to actually get all of these things where they’re needed. This would, naturally, include workers employed at road maintenance, transport drivers (although billionaires seem fairly insistent that these jobs can be eliminated soon), etc. That would provide you with the BARE MINIMUM workers necessary for food production.
Then you perform a similar process for the production of:
Housing
Clothing
Healthcare
Education
Once you have the bare minimum, you can actually talk in concrete terms of just how much of humanity is employed in essential work and how much isn’t. Most likely, when evaluating clothing, the “most efficient source” was sweat shops, so once you know that humanity has enough non-essential workers, you can make a compelling case that laws need to be passed to guarantee that more workers are diverted to clothing production, with an aim of providing better working conditions for all.
We can’t really have intelligent conversations about whether capitalism is or isn’t a good way to allocate resources until we have the data on what the optiminal use would be. We all SAY that the world produces enough for everyone, but nobody really KNOWS.