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DanArmak comments on Why people want to die - Less Wrong
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Thanks. Can you outline which social classes retired, when and why? How common it was, among those who could afford to?
I thought Wikipedia was right to say:
(Of course the fact that Wikipedia says something is weak evidence in itself.)
I'm not sure what you're implying. I certainly didn't mean that we should fight automation, which is what Luddism proposes.
Here's a more specific claim that I believe: automation (or technological improvements in general) will make humans uncompetitive at various jobs until, eventually, 90% of humanity is unable of earning enough to live in a free market (i.e. without guaranteed jobs or income), within 50 years with 80% confidence.
Of course there are many ways people could still survive: government guarantees (of work, of income, of food and shelter); food and shelter themselves becoming orders of magnitude cheaper than today due to technological progress; international charity; technologically driven enhancements to the cognitive skills of (existing, adult) people allowing them to perform more jobs; societies moving away from market capitalism; economies changing radically once 90% of people are no longer wealthy consumers; or an AGI making the whole issue moot.
I am not an expert in Roman history -- my perceptions come from various Roman writings which, as far as I know, treat retirement as a perfectly normal part of old age. Well, for upper classes, of course, I doubt peasants had much in the way of retirement.
Wikipedia is being silly. There is a hint in the sentence "Germany was the first country to introduce retirement, in 1889" -- the expression they want to use is "government pension for everyone". You can't think that before 1889 no one ever retired...:-/
Ah, so you're making a prediction. Note that in the grandfather comment you said (emphasis mine): "Today automation is driving unemployment".
I think Wikipedia is just leaving out some implied restrictions under which the claim is valid. The point about Germany refers specifically to the preceding sentence: "Previously [....] most workers continued to work until death". The innovation of all workers retiring in age cohorts, regardless of individual ability to keep working, occurred in Germany in 1889.
Of course some people always retired, but voluntary retirement was only possible for the rich - a few percent of the population - and since most of them didn't work to begin with, retirement meant something different: withdrawing from public life, giving up public offices, passing on private holdings, etc. Wikipedia is talking about retirement of those who must work to feed themselves, it just doesn't bother specifying this fact because the whole article is about the modern world, not about history.
Before the great majority of people were workers for hire, they were farmers, who I believe also didn't retire unless forced (i.e. injured or frail).
I meant that automation has already priced humans out of many previously profitable markets, and this will only accelerate. So far almost all people automated out of work have been able to find employment doing something else, but I believe this will not last, in part because increasingly many jobs require long and costly training.
So I predict high unemployment, defined as most people not working to earn money for food, shelter and medicine on a free market. My original comment was that in such a future, all these unemployed will have to find reasons to keep living and things to fill their time with, similar to able-bodied retirees today.
You're right that my comment was badly worded, and I'll edit it to be clearer. Thanks!
Really? Given that we are talking about pre-capitalist societies where working for hire (which is what you presumably mean) was not all that common, what do you think these people did? Is working in the fields "work", but managing the farm "not work"?
So then you probably shouldn't rely on this article to provide you with information about history.
Of course the idea of retirement as "not going to do anything but sit on a couch and watch TV" is a recent one. In past societies people retired by not participating in the major work any more, but still helping with whatever they could -- and as they grew older and frailer, that "whatever they could" contracted. But yes, the idea of retiring and doing nothing is fairly new.
This is precisely the Luddite argument: the textile machines have priced humans out of the previously profitable market of weaving.
Humanity survived.
The technological revolution accelerated since early XIX century -- and humanity is still doing fine. Have you checked the US unemployment rate recently?
As to predictions, well, predicting is hard. Especially the future.
I had in mind precisely those rich people who did not hands-on manage the farm, but hired others to do it for them: the upper nobility, for instance.
And that is precisely the idea I wanted to address. The OP's example retirees are of this kind.
That the textile machines priced humans out of the market is a fact. The Luddite argument is that, therefore, the machines should not have been introduced - and I disagree with that.
Never once did I say humanity won't survive automation, or that automation is bad for humanity. Automation can free humanity from the need to work to survive, which would be a very good thing! But societies will have to adjust to stop requiring people to work in order to earn money in order to pay for basic necessities.
You give the outside view: until now automation hasn't caused sustained mass unemployment, so it won't in the future either. I give the inside view: almost all jobs are susceptible to profitable automation, and (almost?) all new kinds of jobs that are introduced require high intelligence and years of study or training.
In addition, there are possible inventions that would be rule-changing if they occurred; in the longer term of decades we can't ignore them. In the most extreme case, AGI could automate all or almost industries. Just because it hasn't happened until now doesn't mean it never will.
I'm not sure what are you saying here. Is it that "predicting the future is so hard I always apply a very low prior to all concrete predictions, no matter what argument is being made"?
This is getting a bit messy, let's recap.
The original disagreement was you saying "The concept of retirement is ... fairly new" and me disagreeing. I still think that sentence is plainly false for most sane values of "retirement".
You also said that what's new is the idea of retiring at a particular age, in cohorts, and that's kinda true. Only kinda because first, as your Wiki link shows, that idea in its contemporary form appeared more than a hundred years ago; and second, because retiring after a term of service is an ancient custom, going back to the Romans (as usual :-D). The Roman army conscripted young men who served for 25 years after which they retired -- they were released from the military service and given a noticeable sum of money and a plot of land. That practice (conscripting young men for a long term of service with a large payout or an annuity at the end) survived in some armies until the XIX century.
I also disagree with pretty much all of this passage, I don't think it correctly reflects life in pre-industrial societies:
Going back to the question of why contemporary retirees are... problematic, let me suggest what I think is a standard explanation -- the main cause is the breakdown of the extended family and the alienating character of cities.
Imagine someone old and frail in a village. She lives in a house (or a hut) with her family, many of them her descendants. There is a lot of life going all around her. There is an innumerable number of small tasks which she can do -- watch the grandkids, patch up some clothes, cook something for the workers, fix the hole in the wall, etc. etc. She is not isolated, she continues to be part of her family and part of her community. She always has something to do.
Compare that to an opposite case: someone old and frail living in an apartment in a big city. She lives alone because her single child has his own family and lives far away. The only things she really needs to do is shop for food, cook it (or eat out of the can), and clean the apartment. She doesn't have much of a support network -- the great majority of people she sees every day are strangers. And, of course, there is the idiot box to make the passing of time less painful...
About Luddites -- I agree that "the textile machines priced humans out of the market is a fact". The point, however, is the link between machinery and unemployment -- the link which you asserted in your original comment and what the Luddites really cared about. I doubt they were terrible attached to manual weaving -- what they wanted was a job, sustenance. Both the Luddites and you say that automation causes unemployment and that is empirically not true. Whether it continues to be not true is, of course, a different question.
As to predicting the future, yes, I have a low prior for specific predictions far into the future (50+ years) because I don't think there's any evidence that humans can consistently do that. In this particular case you're not predicting that the usual pattern will continue, but you argue that it will break, so it seems to me the burden of proof is on you to show why that pattern will not hold.
With the expectation that they'd start a family and farm said plot of land. This is not the same as what we normally think of as retirement.
I am not sure what you normally think of as retirement. Buying a condo in Florida and spending the last few functioning brain cells on bingo?
Retirement implies not working in order to earn money to survive. If the Romans in question had to work their farms, they weren't retired. But if e.g. they were given enough money to buy and keep slaves who did all of the work, then they could fairly be said to have retired.
Apologies for the late reply.
The concept of retirement isn't new. But the phenomenon of mass and/or purely age-based retirement is new. My original comment may have been unclear about this. I never intended to imply that the concept itself was new and retirement completely unheard-of; but it was until recently very rare and not a significant driver of social change. There wasn't much point in talking about "retirees" as a group with particular needs or behaviors.
I'm counting that as "new". (Also, in most of the world, it appeared much later, almost within living memory.) My original point in mentioning retirement was that it's not a universal, common, or necessary feature of human societies, it might plausibly disappear again in the next century, and so it might be a bad model for deathist attitudes.
I thought Roman soldier retirement was more a change of career: they took up farming and settlement instead. But maybe they did so with a nice pension that let slaves do all the work. So I concede that yes, this is a good example of widely practiced retirement, and there may well be others. The introduction of retirement in the 19th century wasn't a unique invention. But I don't think this detracts from my original point, that such retirement is uncommon and likely to disappear again in the future.
I don't think this and the following passages contradict what I said. People didn't retire in the sense of not doing anything productive; they just did other things, and maybe less of them, as they became less capable over the years. Modern retirement is a new phenomenon.
I disagree.
Automation causes, almost tautologically, job loss. Whether there are enough other jobs, pre-existing or created, to avoid unemployment is a separate question. Until today there automation has been insufficient to cause high unemployment. I believe that in the next 50 years there is likely to come an inflection point after so many jobs will be automated away, so quickly, that the market will not be able to keep up (even if in a much longer term more jobs might be created again), and societies will have to choose some non-market answers to letting people live without earning money.
I think it's that dreaded point in the conversation when we actually have to start defining things :-/ We probably have a different idea of what the word "retirement" means.
Let me throw in a few edge examples.
Alice has a hobby farm. She mostly lives off her savings with the farm providing occasional addtional income. Is she retired?
Bill has the last name of Gates. Is he retired?
Charlie has some money, but he spends his days day-trading the financial markets for fun and profit. He doesn't have to do this, but he likes the excitement. Is he retired?
Dusty won a minor jackpot in Las Vegas and is enjoying life in the Caribbean. He has no idea what he'll do when the money runs out in a few years. Is he retired?
Elon has enough money to never work another day in his life. Is he retired?
Finnegan has a disability pension which keeps him fed but poor -- so on occasion he gets a temporary job as greeter at Wal-Mart. Is he retired?
I don't think this is a useful way to look at things. By this measure any kind of progress or improvement causes job loss. When the first farmers got enough food surplus so that not everyone had to work the fields, that caused job loss. When some clever fellow invented the plough, that caused job loss. A water wheel was the cause of very large job loss -- etc. etc.
Jobs are not static. They are not supposed to last forever. The world changes -- old jobs disappear, new ones appear.
Saying that progress causes job loss is like saying that evolution causes the extinction of species. Yes, it certainly does, but are we, um, short of different species today?
Would you like to provide some arguments for your belief, estimate probabilities, maybe?
I think of "retirement" as "a person no longer working in any field, and living off a different income source".
This has many unclear edge cases. As you point out, so does the concept of "work" itself.
The central case I want to capture is that of the person who worked to earn, and is still capable of doing so (if perhaps in a different job or reduced capacity), but decides not to (as opposed to being forced by e.g. frailty), and has enough money saved or in a pension to support them for the rest of their life.
And one of the causes of particular jobs disappearing is automation. This is useful because it helps us predict whether, in the future, increased automation might quickly eliminate many jobs.
There are processes driving job loss and separate processes driving job creation. They are related by market and social forces, but they don't have to stay balanced, just as there is sometimes a mass extinction. If we have reason to think that a cause of job loss will greatly increase in the future, and don't expect any cause of job creation to also increase greatly in the same period, then we should expect mass unemployment.
I very much would - I want to know myself how convincing a formal argument would be; maybe I'll change my mind while trying to build it. I hope to have the time to do so tonight or tomorrow night.
Job destruction isn't a mystery to you - you've identified the central cause as automation (there are other causes, but let's not get hung up on them too much). Is it fair to say that job creation -is- a mystery to you - given that you haven't identified a central cause of job creation?
Well, that's a reasonable definition. But this particular concept of retirement is not new at all and does not mention retiring in cohorts or at a particular age. I am pretty sure some Romans retired like this a couple of thousand years ago :-)
Since we're talking, basically, economics we might as well use the proper terminology. You are making the argument that any increase in the productivity of labor leads to job losses.
If you want to base your prediction on available evidence (aka historical data), note that other than in short term, increases in the productivity of labor have not led to massive unemployment.
No, I don't think they are separate processes, I think they're much more like flip sides of the same coin. You can't create without destroying. For someone to become a scribe, he has to be not needed as a farmhand.
In general, when thinking about jobs, you might want to think in terms of "creating value" and "(re)distributing value". A job is not a benefit -- it's a cost (in human time and effort) of producing value.