RE: Why "Automation Destroys Jobs" is a Diseased View of Humanity
Most of your argument centers around the notion that automation and the resultant job loss is positive because it "frees up" people to pursue more rewarding endeavors. The problem with this idea is that they were free in the first place. They're not like those air traffic controllers in the 80s. The national guard wouldnt have forced them them to go back to work when they wanted to leave because America needs Twinkies.
ANy one of those 22000 people could have quit being a Twinkie maker and put themselves on a path to becoming a veterinary optometrist, or a neo-impressionistic painter, or an internet pornography producer, or anything else they wanted.
Out of all the options available to them, most of these people elected to become bakers (which, by the way, isn't an ignoble or undignified trade). This is a skilled unionized trade. They probably made a good middle class wage.
Some of these people will find similar jobs with other companies, where they'll basically be starting over in terms of seniority and pay. Maybe a few will really change the course of their stars and this will be an opportunity instead of a hardship. But a lot of these people are going to be forced into menial, unskilled labor just to get by. Though its speculation, my guess is that most of these people are going to end up worse off than they were, for the foreseeable future.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against automation. I think its necessary to make society better, and in the long term and broad perspective, it confers exactly the benefits you discuss. The hardship and the displacement it causes is a necessary evil that the companies in question ought to do what they can to ameliorate.
Progress is awesome. And it will still be awesome without trying to wrap the inevitable displacement and hardship it causes in peaches and gravy.
See @ragnarok's comment. Also, you've missed my critical point: yes, the twinkie bakers could change jobs, and that's great for them individually, but it doesn't move humanity forward. People still want twinkies, so someone else has to take that job. It's zero-sum. Automation fills that role, and still meets the demand for twinkies. It's no longer zero-sum. Humanity as a whole has just taken a step forward: people get what they want (twinkies) and they get to move on from the mundane task of twinkie-making to something new.
Now yes, the individual has turbulence there (much worse than it should be due to state violence, again, see @ragnarok's comment), but that's life. The universe is constantly changing, never the same one moment to the next, so if you want to live in it, you have to adapt to the change. My point is that if humanity as a whole is ever to move forward, we have to break the zero-sum game, meaning someone's going to have to vacate a job that no one else has to fill. That's the only way to move humanity as a whole forward.
Thats the thing. No one has to take the job. It isnt as though there's a twinkie production draft. Its a matter of supply and demand.
I suppose it is zero sum in a sense, because as the supply of twinkie bakers dwindles, it costs more money to hire them, and increases the price of twinkies, so the twinkie consumers lose out.
but, As to the notion that work is a bad thing, i disagree. I don't think a world where machines do all the work for us (and people just what, sit at home and spank it?) is a better world. Maybe there are vocations that you think are positive and vocations you think are negative, but thats entirely subjective. Its only a zero sum game if you assume that a someone having a job baking twinkies is a negative either for the individual or for society as a whole.
Im probably living a life closer than most amercians get to @Ragnarok's ideal. But to get there i had to put myself through college and law school as a (you guessed it) industrial baker. No not for hostess. I made bagels, not twinkies. And no, i never contemplated it as a career. But i knew people who were professional bakers, and most of them enjoyed their profession. You seem to believe that being a baker is somehow ignoble... that society is worse off because people have to do it. But it appeals to many people. For many more, its an opportunity, not an obligation.
At first glance, your idea sounds great. But the reality is that if you get rid of the bottom, you get rid of the opportunity for anyone to start there.
As a side note, you chose a terrible example for a post lauding the wonders of automation. If you look at how hostess handled the whole thing (including spending off all their assets on massive executive bonuses to drive themselves into bankruptcy and escape their union and unemployment obligations) its really difficult to cheer for them. In terms of maximizing the "individual turbulence" due to the apoption of automation, its hostess, not the state, thats the bad guy here.
I would like to know where you got the idea what I hold work as a bad thing, so I can revise that statement. That is not a component of my argument, and I do not believe that at all.
I'd also like to disabuse you of the notion that I see baking as an ignoble profession. I have a lot of respect for bakers, and I appreciate their products very much! The subjective positive or negative connotation of a profession is also immaterial to my argument.
My argument is rooted in the observation that society is dynamic. The jobs society views as valuable are dynamic. So as society evolves, people must either evolve with it and transition to more valuable jobs as their current jobs become less valuable, or leave society because they can no longer contribute more than they consume. Moreover, any job which is worth automating is by definition not sufficiently valuable to society to justify its existence. If it were, it wouldn't be worth automating. Automation, however, allows the job to be vacated in favor of a more valuable one without being a detriment to society: the value the job created is still produced; it's just produced more cheaply now (which ultimately means it can continue to exist for the time being, rather than being lost entirely). The fact that the value can be produced more cheaply, on the macro scale, implies that costs in society are down which can only help the individuals who were unseated while they learn new skills.
For many more, its an opportunity, not an obligation.
Certainly so! And I welcome this. I don't think bakers will ever go away; human creativity is infinite and so is human desire, so there will always be infinite room for bakers to create value in new ways. But apparently, the baking of twinkies is not terribly valuable anymore.
At first glance, your idea sounds great. But the reality is that if you get rid of the bottom, you get rid of the opportunity for anyone to start there.
There is no bottom and there is no top. There will always be lower paid and higher paid jobs because there will always be lower-valued and higher-valued contributions to society. I do note, however, that the obvious jobs (the ones that meet basic needs) are all being automated away at this point, so people will need to become more creative about how they will contribute value to society. The upside is that basic needs can be met more cheaply than ever before, so it's easier than ever to experiment. Unfortunately, the Treadmill Effect mitigates this advantage. Thus it may be that if humanity is to survive (let alone flourish), it will need to quickly do away with debt-based currency.
And fortunately, twinkies are also immaterial to my point. I agree, Hostess is not to be held blameless in all of this. The idea that I attempted to express in the OP was triggered when I was reading about the Hostess situation, though, which is why I cited it rather than some other example of automation. I certainly do not cheer for a company that makes poison and sells it as food.