Big Question of the Day: How many workers does the economy need?

[reformist2]

It's really not clear to me anymore. Everyone still assumes that a healthy economy provides "full employment." But what is full employment? We don't ask or expect seniors to work (at least not Dems!), and we stopped allowing children to work full time many years ago. And yet the economy hums along just fine without them.

So.... why does everyone just assume that a healthy economy should provide jobs for every able-bodied adult under 65? What if the economy only really needed half of all adults age 21-65 to work, in order for everything to get done? Or only one quarter? You start to think about these questions, and pretty soon it leads you to realize our very economic system is wholly inadequate to deal with modern realities...

[liberal N proud]

1. How does the other half support themselves and their families?

If there are no jobs for 50% of the working age population, then how do they live?

[jollyreaper2112]

4. Good question

If you are a Democrat: basic guaranteed income.
If you are republican: fuck off and die.

[Demo_Chris]

5. That will increasingly become THE question...

And more, how many AMERICAN workers? Technology and outsourcing are working together (and feeding off each other) in a job shredding frenzy. As the number of jobs declines, the number of people with disposable income falls with it, thus eliminating the need for still more local service jobs. Some will strike out and create new businesses to support themselves and their families -- this is what I have done -- but I suspect that many Americans lack the basics to make that work.

How long will it be before a new wave of entrepreneurs are going door to door, business to business, offering to automate and outsource local jobs to India and elsewhere? Why continue paying your current bookkeeper, the one with an associate degree, 30K a year, when by working through an outsource consultant you can hire someone with a Doctorate with an emphasis on US Tax law for a mere 12K a year? Why continue to pay fast food workers 17K a year, when you can now automate that fry-guy position for as little as perhaps 30K? Your robotic fry guy NEVER calls in sick, never hurts himself, never complains, never burns a batch, never shorts a customer, and every fry is done to perfection. What business owner wouldn't want that? The same applies to other jobs we think are hellish today. Soon companies like Amazon wont need those pickers, robots will do it better, and tens-of-thousands of $10 an hour jobs will be gone.

And there is not much anyone can do to stop it.

[reformist2]

10. It's actually quite a silly question, the more you think about it....

If the economy produces ample food, clothing and shelter - with surpluses of each, for good measure,
then the question we all should be asking is, what kind of stupid economic/political system would allow
anyone to go hungry or homeless? Whether or not you work should be irrelevant to your right to these
basics, which are now in ample supply.

[madokie]

2. Part time jobs in high school and for us Seniors

who can still work but other than that we need enough jobs so that anyone who wants to work can do so and be paid enough to provide for themselves and possibly a family in the process.

I started working in the summer of '61 helping my 4 year older brother and my 63 year old bad in health Dad built our house we lived in from then on. The following school year and summer I worked part time. I was born in '48 so that made me 13 YO. I worked at the school after classes sweeping the classrooms, seems like I remember being paid 25 cents an hour and that allowed me to have money in my pocket from then on. The summers of '62 '63 and '64 I worked driving nails behind drywallers. Made 50 cents an hour the first two summers with the last one making it all the way up to 75 cents. I was making more than I was spending at the time. I think part time jobs are good for kids who can and want to work.

[DetlefK]

3. The purpose of the economy is to circulate goods and money. The rest is secondary.

Access to work is only important as long as it's a means to get money and/or goods.

With automatization, less and less work is needed to create the same amount of money and goods.

And the situation will get worse with the technological advancement: 3D-printers mass-producing small parts, intelligent robots for tasks that don't really need a fully human worker, increasing connection and increasing integration of information technologies in everyday-life...

Humans will be left with the jobs that require lots of skill&intelligence and with jobs that don't require thinking, just flexibility. The rest will get replaced.

The only solution I see is a socialized economy where the availability of income and the availability of work are no longer directly coupled.

[Demo_Chris]

6. And THAT will require a new enlightenment. nt

[reformist2]

11. "...the availability of income and the availability of work are no longer directly coupled." Exactly

Especially when the economy as it is, is already producing all the things everyone needs, and then some.
With the exception of a handful of public works projects to restore our infrastructure, I'm not seeing any
way to employ the millions of people who need incomes.

[madville]

7. Less and less per capita

Automation and technology will continue to reduce the need for workers, traditionally middle to lower-middle class workers. Even minimum wage type jobs will dry up as automation eventually takes a bigger role in things like fast food.

It's not unrealistic to think there will be human-like robots/cyborgs within 100 years doing most minimum wage jobs like a grocery store shelf stocker or working the drive-thru at McDonalds.

If I was a teenager today I would look at jobs in things like robotics or automation technology, things like PLCs, electromechanics and electronics.

[Waiting For Everyman]

8. As many workers as we have.

It is up to government to be the employer of last resort, to implement FDR-style projects that need doing, so that all can earn a living who need and want to.

It is up to government to provide a framework under which people can make a life. To fail to do so, as we have, and then insist that people make it on their own, as we do, is a sick FRAUD of the first magnitude because it puts a life-and-death demand on people which is known full-well to be impossible.

This idea that most people exhibit that "it's not my problem" when people can't find any way to make it in life today, is bullshit.

I don't really give a flying rat's butt what the economy needs. The economy serves society, not the other way around.

[reformist2]

12. I don't want the government dreaming up jobs. I'd rather give people money, and let them be free.

[Squinch]

9. If we need fewer jobs, the key to keeping the economy going is to cut hours and increase pay.

If we do this, the demand for goods will continue, and it doesn't matter if a robot or a human makes the good as long as the humans have enough money to pay for them. So fewer jobs should make more money. And because there are fewer, they should be split or shared, with each worker still making a living wage.

Sort of like in the old days where only white guys had jobs, but we decided that those jobs had to pay well enough that a bus driver or factory worker could make enough money to raise a family on one salary and send a couple of kids to college, and own a house and a car.

[clarice]

13. Alternative? nt