Unemployment by Degrees [Unsourcing]
There's a lot of argument about "Outsourcing", the process of farming out work to other providers, frequently in other countries. There's a lot of blame tossed around about this. But I want to suggest that not all of those jobs arrive. Some of them are Unsourced, and simply don't need to be done any more.
I'm very interested in productivity. Not in achieving it, but in the consequences. Suppose you and 100 other people have a given job, and by various tricks, your industry (of 100 people) figures out how to save 5% of its time. If demand doesn't go up, congratulations, 5 people are gonna lose their jobs after the market consolidates.
I like to call this Unsourcing. No one's getting the job, it just doesn't exist anymore. This is what productivity is all about - not hiring people, and firing them if you can get away with it.
This brings me to a recent TechCrunch article:
Thus far, things have generally worked out; and new labor replaces old labor. But robots throw a wrinkle into blue collar jobs, and software reduces the need for white collar jobs. I don't know where this is going, but I'm pretty worried about it.
Edit: Looks like ComputerWeekly.com beat me to this term in 2001. I think they were somewhat uncritical of the terminology at the time, which as stated was essentially a euphemism for "firing people". I stick by my usage here.
I'm very interested in productivity. Not in achieving it, but in the consequences. Suppose you and 100 other people have a given job, and by various tricks, your industry (of 100 people) figures out how to save 5% of its time. If demand doesn't go up, congratulations, 5 people are gonna lose their jobs after the market consolidates.
I like to call this Unsourcing. No one's getting the job, it just doesn't exist anymore. This is what productivity is all about - not hiring people, and firing them if you can get away with it.
This brings me to a recent TechCrunch article:
Engineers Are The Best Deal - So Stock Up On ThemAs an engineer, I get paid to increase productivity for some group of people. Sometimes those people are engineers as well. My job is killing your job.
Software engineers today are about 200-400% more productive than software engineers were 10 years ago because of open source software, better programming tools, common libraries, easier access to information, better education, and other factors. This means that one engineer today can do what 3-5 people did in 1999!
Thus far, things have generally worked out; and new labor replaces old labor. But robots throw a wrinkle into blue collar jobs, and software reduces the need for white collar jobs. I don't know where this is going, but I'm pretty worried about it.
Edit: Looks like ComputerWeekly.com beat me to this term in 2001. I think they were somewhat uncritical of the terminology at the time, which as stated was essentially a euphemism for "firing people". I stick by my usage here.
Labels: unsourcing
posted by Crutcher | Permalink @9:46 AM
2 Comments:
You shouldn't worry too much. Having an excess of goods and services (high efficiency) would drive down prices, reduce demands for labor and would lower wages.(or higher wages for a smaller segment of the population) Sounds bad right? Well not exactly. A disaster is not having enough goods and services. I won't give you a direct answer but riddle me this: why do you want a job? Do you enjoy working such hours and toiling? Taking your argument to its logical extreme, if we created machines that built themselves, maintained themselves, produced goods and services to meet our needs, would we then be unemployed and starve in the streets? (no)
Next step Strong Artificial Intelligence, that writes us(Software Engineers/All Knowledge workers) out of jobs. There are really only 2 alternatives then. If the market is free, then the reduced cost of making things available will drive down costs until things are largely free/cheap - this would require some sort of basic income grant so that people could buy this mass produced stuff because no one would be payed for their work(the value of their labour being driven down by the machines that can do a better/faster/cheaper job). The alternative is that government continues to protect industries that hold monopolies, those companies continue to lay off people until we have a small ruling class and a massive serf class, and that would suck.
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