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jdgalt comments on The Robots, AI, and Unemployment Anti-FAQ - Less Wrong
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One example: raising the minimum wage makes lower-productivity workers permanently unemployable, because their work is not worth the price, so no one can afford to hire them any more.
When the government raises minimum wage, it effectively funds the development of automation, as businesses seek replacements for low-end labor. (Like Amazon buying that robotics company to build warehouse management robots.)
Heck, you could almost say that AI doesn't cause unemployment; the need for unemployment causes AI. When labor cost increases without a productivity gain, there has to be a productivity gain to make up for it, and the pain of the increase motivates businesses to actually look for alternatives to their current ways of doing something.
So every time the minimum wage goes up, companies will replace more and more of their former minimum wage workers with automation. Somehow, the politicians never catch on to this, or they know and don't care. It makes me want to scream every time I get a promotional email from some organization talking about how evil low wages are and how the minimum wage needs to be raised. Don't they know they are going to make jobs go away, basically forever?
The same holds true for all regulations that increase the cost of employing people. European countries, which combine rules such as France's 32-hour work week and Germany's 6 weeks of paid vacation per year with rules that make it very difficult and time-consuming to get rid of an employee (whether for cause or because your industry is in a slump), have made labor there so expensive that those countries have much higher "structural" unemployment rates than the US. ("Structural" being political economist speak for an "irreducible minimum", at least so long as the policy makers are unwilling to consider changing the laws that caused it.) European pundits are starting to call these laws what they are -- old people voting themselves job security at the expense of their children.
The US is in the depression it is precisely because those regulatory and tax burdens are growing faster here than they have in 40 years -- mostly behind closed doors, though Obamacare is playing its part. I largely blame the green movement, because they (or some of them) are the only people besides Middle East terrorists who will actually admit they want us no longer to be a wealthy country. Still, they seem to command a huge legion of dupes, who I hope can be awakened to the fact that this causation exists and do something to stop it.
Downvoted for needless inflammatory language, even though I would have upvoted this for the content otherwise.
I apologize for the language, but I felt it needed to be said & I don't know a nicer way.
I've expanded on this in the current survey thread.