Given there’s not any momentum that I’m aware of to convert light rail in any American city to automated (and increase security with labor savings) despite this being a solved problem for decades, I’m skeptical we’re anything less than 20 years away from automated busses replacing bus drivers in Americas blue cities.
I mean, they really are. Look at America's seaports. They are much less efficient than Asian and European seaports because of the lack of automation and not being operational 24/7.
I find this fascinating because I am guessing the Euro seaports also employ Unions? Has anyone tried to take a "look how much better the German union is doing compared to yours?" approach when negotiating?
Unions are standing athwart the path of an oncoming train yelling "help us!" Why is it that (mostly non-union) Americans expressing outrage at poorly-executed trade policy that created economic devastation in specific industries is considered authentic and legitimate political expression, while unions trying to prevent economic devastation for their members in other economic sectors is considered greedy, grasping and counter-productive? All the embarrassment belongs to -- and all of the anger and frustration should be directed toward -- the public policy industrial complex (of which this blog and its ilk are a part), which has yet to devise or implement any credible or reliable solutions to these increasingly frequent failures to reconcile technology-driven efficiency and net economic benefit with stakeholder-specific harms. Typing shruggies and "that's sad"s while worshipping at Schumpeter's tomb doesn't really cut it. Not intellectually and certainly not politically.
It is possible to conclude in a given case both that a) the interests of the Union do not align with the interests of society as a whole and b) the Union is a perfectly reasonable organization acting in good faith.
The union doesn't have to be "greedy" or "grasping" to be counterproductive.
Also, as an aside, I don't think the tone you are using is very conducive to persuading others to adopt your position.
As to both logic and tone, please read the comments and many like them in this space. There is a LOT of reflexive, gratuitous union-bashing that does not confine itself to cases in which union interests are carefully and clearly distinguished from broader societal interests. Nor is it the case that -- whatever pretenses we all share -- the interests of "society as a whole" are somehow better known to or more accurately represented by commenters here than by unions making demands for their members. If this is meant to be a haven for consequentialist / aggregationist analysis, then the first principle is that all interests of all members of society are adverse to some degree all the time. Unions trying to capture more surplus for their members are competing with shareholders trying to capture more for their portfolios, are competing with executives trying to capture more for their salaries, are competing with consumers trying to demand lower prices. Reduced mortality from better AI driving is "paid for" with job losses and increased private costs for transportation and investment capital diverted from other productive uses.
Ultimately, nobody is against generating net positive sums from technological progress, but everybody disagrees about how best to allocate the net positive sums. Most people claiming to represent the interests of "society as a whole" are really just arguing for the net positive sum, which, as I say, is the easy part (and what, I believe, you are doing when you say union demands are counterproductive). My only "position" is that union demands should be seen as operating at the distributional level, on par with other distributional claims exercised through tax rates, spending cuts, minimum wages, executive compensation, etc. Calling unions "a few inefficient rent extractors" as one commenter here does (is that acceptable "tone"?) deliberately obscures the fundamental equivalence of all these claims and claimants, but heeding his call to develop "a coherent set of programs for wealth transfer" would make that equivalence clear in a hurry.
Any instance of a union is a good example of where unions are clearly not our friend. If you think poor people should get more stuff, you should support a coherent set of programs for wealth transfer, not a few inefficient rent extractors setting things up nicely for themselves.
That's fine for the 9 actual consistent neoliberals out there, but in the real world, the vast majority of anti-union people are also anti-government transfers.
I also, think as much as hurts neoliberals to hurt, people would rather be unionized and make more wages than be cut a pity check from the government because they're unskilled workers.
To your first point, if that is, in fact, a popular opinion, then the job is to convince folks otherwise. If it is an unpopular opinion, it would be nice to force them to own it.
To your second, "people" is way too broad. Once you account for union fees and the like, there are plenty of professions where non-union workers would probably make more. In general, Unions trade wages for job security, benefits, work/life balance, etc. Also, they solve for the lowest common denominators, meaning in any given union, the worst workers are overpaid and the best workers are underpaid. "People" is the whole bell curve, so I would disagree.
As soon as I'm convinced any sort of job has actual good ways to determine whose the "best workers" or "worst workers" outside of obvious outliers, maybe I'll start thinking about having so little solidarity with fellow workers I'd screw them over for a few bucks more a year.
If your only goal in life is to make as much as possible and screw everybody else on the way, then yes, I'm not shocked you're anti-union.
As far as convincing people, that's on the McKinsey grads and other neoliberals who stay awake at night in horror that a non-college educated auto worker, grocery cashier, etc. might be earning a little more than their supposed worth is, all as CEO's making combined, billions than their supposed worth to convince conservatives not to be ghouls.
I mean... literally every job I have worked at, there were a people that everyone could identify on both ends of the spectrum. If you are in a profession where this is hard, though, I can see how the union could benefit both employees and employers.
"If your only goal in life is to make as much as possible and screw everybody else on the way, then yes, I'm not shocked you're anti-union."
Ah, I see we've moved on the part where you've already made up your mind about everything, and I must be the bad guy because I didn't should "You go, Jesse!" Carry on, then.
I think the wealth transfer is only one part of it, though—there are all sorts of employer abuses that wouldn't be corrected with just more money. But I'm a union member so I'm definitely biased here!
I think there's a range of anti-poverty programs that could prompt employees to say "take this job and shove it" to abusive workplaces, but that range probably overlaps considerably with one where labor force participation drops off a lot.
Well I'm a Southerner who is reflexively somewhat anti-union plus I had some really bad experiences with the UAW that cemented that view, so you are preaching to the choir.
But I don't want to come across as a crank on the topic, so limited my comment to a specific example where unions are very clearly harmful. =)
To be fair, pro-union people want all or most jobs to be unionized, or at least governed by a collecting bargaining agreement, as is the case in some European countries. So in theory everyone would benefit, not just a small number of unionized workers.
For sure I'm not sold on whether this would be a good thing, I wish Matt would do a piece on it actually.
That would address the issue of it being a small number getting the advantage of a union, but there's other issues to consider, too. For any given union, there are rents extracted to the benefit of the union members and the detriment of everyone else. If that were the only effect, then maybe economy-wide unionization would more or less even out. But those rents are also *inefficiently* extracted, making everyone poorer. Those countries in Europe with economy-wide unionization are much poorer than the United States.
I think it's clear that Matt is pro-union for political reasons, regardless of the economics.
When it comes to policy, Matt isn't a political hack. He holds positions because he believes the empirical evidence backs them up. He would never say "unions are good because lefties think so" - he certainly isn't afraid to critique lefties when he thinks they're wrong.
I'm skeptical of widespread unionization for the reasons you say. But yes, Matt does seem to be pro-union, so I wish he would do a piece making the case for it, beyond simply saying "the current US collective bargaining model is bad" - literally everyone already agrees on that, the only reason it persists is that the disagreements on an alternative model are too wide.
Matt has changed my mind on other issues, maybe he could do the same with unions. I would also love for someone to take a dive into why sectoral bargaining seems to work so well in Germany but so poorly for US automakers.
I think the reason most people in the comments are not as pro-union as Democratic politicians is they're mostly college-educated well-off in demand knowledge/etc. workers who have never needed the specific backing of a union to help them or protect them.
I don't think Matt is a political hack, but I also think he is somewhat of a political realist. He recongizes that unions are a huge boost to the Democratic party, so he supports them for that reason, even if the economic case doesn't make much sense. Not because he's a party hack, but because the Democrats tend to advance causes he believes in.
Hasn't he already declared for strong unions with sectoral bargaining (Nordic Model)? Think it was a couple years ago so maybe worth a revisit in this era of higher inflation and interest rates.
Management and business owners are also trying to extract rents. It is neither unique to unions nor are they necessarily the most effective rent extractors at the expense of the larger population.
"Management and business owners are also trying to extract rents."
Yep, they sure are! Which is why we have anti-trust laws that explicitly make that rent-seeking behavior illegal. But we have laws that explicitly make union rent-seeking behavior protected. I think that's bad.
I don’t think we have the demonstrated technology for driverless light rail. We do have demonstrated technology for driverless fully grade separated rail, like the Vancouver skytrain and the new Honolulu system. But you have to design the system with full separation of the relevant sorts.
It would be interesting to know which, if any, cities in Japan or Korea or China or Taiwan have made any move to convert existing rail to driverless, to know how feasible this is. (I’m not aware of any such cities - I think Copenhagen and Paris have a few driverless lines, that were built driverless from the start.)
In the US, BART trains are fully automated for travel, with drivers only operating the doors at stations I believe that the main blocker to automating this (besides drivers' unions, ofc) is the cost of installing platform screen doors at all stations.
Paris has done a couple of conversions. But having worked on feasibility studies of similar projects in my city, the issue is quite simple - you'd need billions to retrofit (most) existing lines to make them suitable for automation, and if you had billions available for capital investment (you probably don't), the RoI would be *much* higher on other projects (including entirely new automated lines!), so no one wants to do it.
Given the ubiquity of car use in America, there will be a larger public call for increasing ease of use to car commuters with this technology. So I would be optimistic; the pressure for regulatory changes could very likely be faster and stronger. And then once people use AVs to get to work from wider sprawl (and thus more people), they'll want more reliable transit for the final commute in.
I think the idea of self-driving vehicles is very exciting. But I wonder about the use case being developed versus what I would find useful enough to pay for. Robotaxis don't seem to offer that much savings versus an Uber or Taxi itself -- the driver just isn't that much of the cost when compared to the capital costs of a Waymo.
On the other hand, it would be very, very helpful to be able to have a few drinks, hop in the car and let it drive me home rather than risk a DUI. Or plop the family in the car in DC at 11:00 PM and wake up at Grandma's house in Jacksonville at 7:00 AM, fully rested and ready to go.
It seems the technology and regulatory path to the use cases I describe above will be measured in decades rather than years, though.
I bet you scolds make it illegal to be intoxicated while occupying the “drivers seat” of an autonomous vehicle. This really is tragic, because reducing DUIs (and permitting freer and more joyous socializing in the suburbs) is a major part of the AV value proposition.
In fairness, this isn't just being a joyless scold; there is something to be said "no system is perfect, and if the car's control system goes on the fritz suddenly, a conscious human driver should be able to take over."
Of course, this also removes the possibility of sleeping in the car (red-eye driving), which would be another major use of autonomous vehicles, so... eh... I dunno? What is the cost-benefit ratio of "I want to get drunk and have my car drive me safely home" vs. "I may fall asleep in the car and never wake up if the driving system decides to break down at the wrong time"?
In safety engineering world, the man in the loop is often a key part of a redundant fault tolerant system.
Yet I wonder how alert we can really expect the 'driver' of an autonomous car to remain, such that they are able to quickly and correctly take over when the car goes on the fritz? Especially if it is presumably a very rare occurrence.
I would wager that even fairly diligent people will let their guard slip significantly.
I _might_ if the car's procedure was to say "I can't handle this", pull over safely to a stop, and _then_ ask me to take over. But never if I have to do it spontaneously.
And even the situation I described also assumes I've been through Driver's Ed.
"Yet I wonder how alert we can really expect the 'driver' of an autonomous car to remain, such that they are able to quickly and correctly take over when the car goes on the fritz? Especially if it is presumably a very rare occurrence."
Yes, this is a point that I've literally been bringing up for at least a decade in discussions about self-driving cars. Advocates for full self-drive frequently waive off questions about irreconcilable conflicts in safety commands and other issues by saying that the car will simply throw control back to the human driver, but, when I took driving classes many, many years ago, I remember being told that a driver has less than 2 seconds on average to react to an adverse event. Obviously, if you have a self-driving car that has to perform some sort of assessment of a situation and then return control to the driver, that's going to shorten the available time to react further (even if we're just talking milliseconds), so the system is (1) going to require a driver to be just as alert and aware as normal, while (2) simultaneously putting the driver into a state of tedium by relieving them of the hundreds or thousands of tiny adjustments a driver has to make under normal driving conditions.
Eh... most truly fault tolerant systems are built around the idea that the human is *guaranteed* to make a mistake, so the machine should work regardless of whether the human screws up.
Not entirely sure those are equivalent. I listened to Senator Chris Murphy speak the other week, and he talked a lot about the crisis of social isolation, etc. and he's a fairly normie Democrat.
Mask politics are tricky, and both sides got some stuff wrong in that debate. But I don't think that wholesale makes Democrats the ant-social policy. At least, I hope not...
I'm not denying communal drinking has benefits, I'm wondering where the tradeoff is between "I want to get drunk with my friends and then pass out in my car" vs. "I want to stay awake and aware so I could take over if Murphy's Law happens on my way home."
This can be answered almost a priori. Autonomous cars are safer than sober humans. Ergo, any policy regime should definitely try to substitute autonomous cars for drunk humans.
Why would you want to be in the drivers seat if you're drunk? Lie down in back. "Freer and more joyous" (by which I assume you mean "drunken") socializing is already a thing in the suburbs and can be accomplished in the front passenger or any of the rear seats.
Why do you say the driver just isn’t that much cost compared to the capital? If your driver needs to make $15 an hour, and the vehicle goes 10 miles per hour, for 100,000 miles, then the cost of the driver is $150,000 over the life of the vehicle. If the vehicle can get a longer life than 100,000 miles, or the driver gets more expensive, then the budget available for the capital expense to become a savings gets larger.
The challenge here is that present dollars are more expensive than future dollars, so 150k up front is going to cost you more than 150k over the lifetime of the vehicle (because of interest or equivalent financing cost paid or forgone.)
That said, labor is expensive enough and capital is cheap enough that your autonomous vehicle doesn't need to be *that* cheap up front for things to pencil out. And because robotaxis don't require as much downtime as human drivers, you can at least theoretically get good revenue-miles in fairly quickly.
For taxis / ubers / robotaxis you have to denominate and compare everything in costs per mile. Robotaxis can accumulate miles and recover capital costs much faster than either taxis or ubers, and it's not yet clear that their initial capital cost will be even 2x the capital cost of those human-driven vehicles. I don't expect the expensive, multi-sensor approach of Waymo to survive unless sensor costs drop dramatically.
AVs probably cost way more than $150,000 today. But in 10 years they'll probably be that cheap, and in 20 years the automation parts will probably be <$10,000
I wish a self-driving car was an option for my dad, who really shouldn't be driving anymore (at least, not without a backup that can automatically take over if he gets distracted or falls asleep) but doesn't want to give it up. I'm sure a lot of older folks are in the same boat, especially as more boomers reach their 70s and soon 80s.
But unfortunately it sounds like that type of usage is pretty far away as well.
My Dad is in his mid 70s and lives in the suburbs of orange county. He and my mom frequently drive to LA to visit my sister and her grandkids. He purchased a Tesla Model 3 a few years ago without the full self driving software. There was a recent update to the software that has been such a significant inlmprovement that they gave him a free 1 month trial of full self driving. He and my mom have been using it to drive door to door from OC to LA with no issues. The software still requires supervision but even at this point he trusts it more than my mom's driving and he chooses to use it because it puts him in the role of an observing passenger and reduces driver fatigue. He is now no longer worried about needing to move out when he is no longer able to drive reliably.
This is a great use case and good example of how the current, imperfect version of FSD can still provide benefits. I have been using the same trial for the last few weeks and while I agree that "supervising" is much less taxing than driving, I am still surprised by the number of mistakes the current (12.3) version makes. I get at least one significant mistake per trip (wrong turn despite correct mapping) and one scary error every 5 trips or so (veering off-map to follow train tracks intersecting a street at grade at a 45 degree angle). It's impossible for me to know how close this version is to "real" FSD that does not require supervision at the technical level, but it does not feel "decades" away by any means.
This is a real problem that forces many older people to put themselves and others at risk. It's shocking how difficult it can be for an elderly person to get by without a car, even in a relatively compact and service-rich independent living community. We are currently going through this with my wife's 92 year old mother in SoCal. We were able to convince her to give up driving (with some help from the DMV) and have had pretty good luck with a service called "gogograndparents", which offers uber and lyft services with drivers trained to expect and cater to elderly clients, as well as a phone number to book rides for non-app savvy seniors. Not a perfect solution by any means, but might be good enough. Good luck!
I think the capital-intensive Waymo model is going to lose. The cheap Tesla model will win. Then the capital cost is a drop in the bucket compared to paying the driver. And then the transition can happen very, very quickly.
it certainly seems that lots of people (even very smart folks in the space) have just completely written them off for quite arbitrary reasons without even considering the quite real advantages the business model has in terms of cost structure / scalability...
I definitely agree that if Tesla solves self-driving in a fully generalized way, it’ll be a huge win for the company and its business model.
But the bear case is worth discussing here. This is a problem with very high execution difficulty— significantly harder than working out a patchwork of effective local solutions. And in its own way, it’s actually also going to be very capital-intensive to solve— as the evolution of language models etc has shown, incremental improvements in neural network performance tend to require increasing compute and training data inputs by orders of magnitude (eg: GPT-4 has about ten times as many parameters as GPT-3), and it’s far from clear that Tesla will get to acceptable fully-generalized performance before these scaling costs get prohibitive. Management’s record of over-promising and under-delivering in this domain many, many times also makes it a lot harder for investors to trust that they actually have a good handle on the problem and a good path to solving it. I don’t think it’s impossible that they pull it off, but there actually are good reasons to be skeptical.
The advantage of the solve-more-limited-cases Waymo approach is that we know it actually works with feasible levels of compute and training data.
Tesla actually has an order of magnitude more data to work with than anyone else (over 1.3 billiion miles of driving data, versus Waymo's 40 million).
Additionally, from a capital stand point...Tesla has been lucky to (somehow?) subsidize this by getting people to pay thousands of dollars a head to beta test the software for them...rather than rely on low wage test drivers to drive in circles on a map.
Per Elon, they are "no longer compute limited" on the training side and the most recent cadence of FSD revisions has proven that (there is a new one going out every 2 weeks, it seems), so it seems like most of that capital has already been spent.
I'm guessing the take up will probably follow a similar path to cars themselves. I get the sense in popular imagination, cars as a mass-produced product widely available to the masses was a quicker process than it really was. Henry Ford and the Model T is held up historically for a variety of reasons, but I think one misconception that's been created about the Model T is that it allowed us to go from a world where everything was horse and carriage to suddenly everyone had a car. But by the end of the 20s, still only 25% of Americans families had a car. https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtid=2&psid=3396#:~:text=In%201929%2C%20a%20quarter%20of,the%20American%20way%20of%20life.
I bring this all up because I think Matt makes a pretty good case that we're in the 1918-1920 stage with driverless cars. Once they allowed on highways, it really will be the case that there is a real use case to take a driverless car over an Uber. Even if we are faraway from everyone owning a driverless car outright, I think we are on the cusp sooner than you think of driverless cars fundamentally changing the nature of urban and suburban living just like Model-T cars did in the 20s.
Until there's competition between multiple robotaxi companies in the same market, there's no real reason for a robotaxi company to charge much less than what a human-driven taxi would cost.
I remember seeing a study a few years ago where some researchers hired chauffeured cars for a group of people to simulate how people would use privately owned AVs. The big takeaways were that total VMT increased ~50%, trip volume increased 25%, and 80% of the number of new trips were deadheading (driving the car with no passengers in it). Transit usage cratered among people with access to a private AV. I’d be nervous of broad based adoption of private AVs without a major congestion tax to manage demand on our roads - the increase in VMT and deadheading would cause huge snarls of congestion without a way to manage it.
I too was amazed that Matt didn't consider the zombie miles problem, and that, as Nathan just said, didn't consider that cars not in parking spaces still have to be physically present somewhere. And yes, I'm guessing that Matt would just counter with congestion pricing, and that's fine, but there's a limit to how effective cars, automated or not, can travel with all the merging and intersections that occur. At some point, there's no way getting around the need for mass transit.
It seems plausible AVs empower much more aggressive sprawl outside a city with commuting to a mass transit stop (bus or light rail) for the final 30 minutes. In fact, a few zombie miles to a charging location could help solve the parking problem that would otherwise hinder this mass adoption for dropping off at a bus or train station to work.
I don't see why that would be the case. When people originally got cars and spread out into the suburbs, that did not spur the development of train stations with big parking lots so they could commute into the city... it spurred the development of suburban office parks (where most American jobs now are), and the replacement of many buildings in America's downtown cores with parking, for the jobs that remained. The jobs sprawled too.
In the UK cities have been introducing low and ultra low emission zones. You're vehicle must be more efficient than some standard or you need to pay a (hefty) fee to drive into the zone. I think it was started in London and has since been rolled out to more cities so it can't be completely politically toxic.
I could see these type of schemes ratcheting up until driving to mass transit station on the outskirts will be cheaper and more convenient than driving all the way to the centre.
I think there is enough in the centre (as opposed to in the suburban office parks) to make that worthwhile
But when the suburban office park took off, there wasn't much remote office work possible to do and the car needed to be driven by the occupant. If both of those variables change for a fraction of workers, you end up with a different calculation.
If anything the move to remote work has intensified the desire for short, simple commutes when people do go in. The pattern we've seen since COVID is that office occupancy has been hit harder in city centers than suburbs. Few people are going to want to mess around with transferring to a train to a dense job center when they could just commute to an office in or near their suburb - whether the first part of the trip is in a self driving car or not.
It seems like the zombie miles problem is a problem of sole ownership vs highly available on demand per-trip renting?
If I own an AV, it's going to do zombie miles for me, and also sit around and do nothing a lot too.
I thought the dream is more like yellow cabs in Manhattan - they're just everywhere, they're hopefully mostly doing useful work, and they're so plentiful the service seems on demand.
Right, as soon as I read the words "you don't need a parking space" I knew there was trouble, because that means that the cars are taking up space on the roads instead. There aren't secret out-of-everybody's-way parking alcoves that AVs would disappear to during downtime; they'd just keep roving around, and we have solid research on TNCs (Uber and Lyft and so on) that that's exactly what happens.
They can of course double, triple, quadruple... park since they can just wake up and shuffle themselves around when one needs to enter service. So while "no parking space" may be an exaggeration, it could still be transformational to land use.
We would end up building those out of the way parking spots, but it would take time. Eventually having a big garage every few blocks would be Waymo efficient than the current system of street parking.
If these are zero emission vehicles (electric yes, but tires also produce emissions, that's still a problem that needs solving) and they're cruising slowly and safely, I'm not sure deadheading is a big problem.
For robo taxis, I wouldn’t think so. If demand is high, ie a time of high traffic, there won’t be much deadheading. Pickups and drop offs would be close. If demand is low there would be some deadheading, but then it wouldn’t matter as much. Deadheading is definitely an unintended consequence of this tech that needs to be monitored.
In the robotaxi vision, existing roads become the new parking lots. During peak, the robos are all driving on the road, during lull, those robos that are still working can easily and safely navigate around the "waiting" robos that are parked in the same roads. But this vision is not fully compatible with a "mixed" system of robos and human drivers, so you will need some version of private vehicle / human driver bans to make it work. This is hugely inefficient land use when compared to transit's footprint, but as a society we have consistently chosen the convenience (and personal efficiency) of door-to-door transport over land use efficiency, so I think that will probably continue.
"Liked" in part for use of "deadheading" -- a term I unselfconsciously use on occasion at work (a law firm) and then have to deal with blank looks from everyone else.
Given there’s not any momentum that I’m aware of to convert light rail in any American city to automated (and increase security with labor savings) despite this being a solved problem for decades, I’m skeptical we’re anything less than 20 years away from automated busses replacing bus drivers in Americas blue cities.
This is a good example of an instance where unions are clearly not our friend.
Unions here are standing athwart history and yelling stop!
I mean, they really are. Look at America's seaports. They are much less efficient than Asian and European seaports because of the lack of automation and not being operational 24/7.
Similarly, any shift to electric vehicles is going to decimate the automotive manufacturing workforce, because EVs are so much simpler overall.
The UAW's recent renegotiation 'success' be damned, it is just going to accelerate outsourcing.
Or we'll put up massive tariffs on EVs and massively overpay for American-made EVs.
I find this fascinating because I am guessing the Euro seaports also employ Unions? Has anyone tried to take a "look how much better the German union is doing compared to yours?" approach when negotiating?
Our pal David Simon is on the side of the American unions there! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-k5bLQ9Epw
Unions are standing athwart the path of an oncoming train yelling "help us!" Why is it that (mostly non-union) Americans expressing outrage at poorly-executed trade policy that created economic devastation in specific industries is considered authentic and legitimate political expression, while unions trying to prevent economic devastation for their members in other economic sectors is considered greedy, grasping and counter-productive? All the embarrassment belongs to -- and all of the anger and frustration should be directed toward -- the public policy industrial complex (of which this blog and its ilk are a part), which has yet to devise or implement any credible or reliable solutions to these increasingly frequent failures to reconcile technology-driven efficiency and net economic benefit with stakeholder-specific harms. Typing shruggies and "that's sad"s while worshipping at Schumpeter's tomb doesn't really cut it. Not intellectually and certainly not politically.
It is possible to conclude in a given case both that a) the interests of the Union do not align with the interests of society as a whole and b) the Union is a perfectly reasonable organization acting in good faith.
The union doesn't have to be "greedy" or "grasping" to be counterproductive.
Also, as an aside, I don't think the tone you are using is very conducive to persuading others to adopt your position.
As to both logic and tone, please read the comments and many like them in this space. There is a LOT of reflexive, gratuitous union-bashing that does not confine itself to cases in which union interests are carefully and clearly distinguished from broader societal interests. Nor is it the case that -- whatever pretenses we all share -- the interests of "society as a whole" are somehow better known to or more accurately represented by commenters here than by unions making demands for their members. If this is meant to be a haven for consequentialist / aggregationist analysis, then the first principle is that all interests of all members of society are adverse to some degree all the time. Unions trying to capture more surplus for their members are competing with shareholders trying to capture more for their portfolios, are competing with executives trying to capture more for their salaries, are competing with consumers trying to demand lower prices. Reduced mortality from better AI driving is "paid for" with job losses and increased private costs for transportation and investment capital diverted from other productive uses.
Ultimately, nobody is against generating net positive sums from technological progress, but everybody disagrees about how best to allocate the net positive sums. Most people claiming to represent the interests of "society as a whole" are really just arguing for the net positive sum, which, as I say, is the easy part (and what, I believe, you are doing when you say union demands are counterproductive). My only "position" is that union demands should be seen as operating at the distributional level, on par with other distributional claims exercised through tax rates, spending cuts, minimum wages, executive compensation, etc. Calling unions "a few inefficient rent extractors" as one commenter here does (is that acceptable "tone"?) deliberately obscures the fundamental equivalence of all these claims and claimants, but heeding his call to develop "a coherent set of programs for wealth transfer" would make that equivalence clear in a hurry.
The tone certainly alienated me.
Any instance of a union is a good example of where unions are clearly not our friend. If you think poor people should get more stuff, you should support a coherent set of programs for wealth transfer, not a few inefficient rent extractors setting things up nicely for themselves.
That's fine for the 9 actual consistent neoliberals out there, but in the real world, the vast majority of anti-union people are also anti-government transfers.
I also, think as much as hurts neoliberals to hurt, people would rather be unionized and make more wages than be cut a pity check from the government because they're unskilled workers.
To your first point, if that is, in fact, a popular opinion, then the job is to convince folks otherwise. If it is an unpopular opinion, it would be nice to force them to own it.
To your second, "people" is way too broad. Once you account for union fees and the like, there are plenty of professions where non-union workers would probably make more. In general, Unions trade wages for job security, benefits, work/life balance, etc. Also, they solve for the lowest common denominators, meaning in any given union, the worst workers are overpaid and the best workers are underpaid. "People" is the whole bell curve, so I would disagree.
As soon as I'm convinced any sort of job has actual good ways to determine whose the "best workers" or "worst workers" outside of obvious outliers, maybe I'll start thinking about having so little solidarity with fellow workers I'd screw them over for a few bucks more a year.
If your only goal in life is to make as much as possible and screw everybody else on the way, then yes, I'm not shocked you're anti-union.
As far as convincing people, that's on the McKinsey grads and other neoliberals who stay awake at night in horror that a non-college educated auto worker, grocery cashier, etc. might be earning a little more than their supposed worth is, all as CEO's making combined, billions than their supposed worth to convince conservatives not to be ghouls.
"outside of obvious outliers"
I mean... literally every job I have worked at, there were a people that everyone could identify on both ends of the spectrum. If you are in a profession where this is hard, though, I can see how the union could benefit both employees and employers.
"If your only goal in life is to make as much as possible and screw everybody else on the way, then yes, I'm not shocked you're anti-union."
Ah, I see we've moved on the part where you've already made up your mind about everything, and I must be the bad guy because I didn't should "You go, Jesse!" Carry on, then.
I doubt you're convincing anyone with this ranting.
I think the wealth transfer is only one part of it, though—there are all sorts of employer abuses that wouldn't be corrected with just more money. But I'm a union member so I'm definitely biased here!
Yeah, I'm a lot more sympathetic to that perspective.
I think there's a range of anti-poverty programs that could prompt employees to say "take this job and shove it" to abusive workplaces, but that range probably overlaps considerably with one where labor force participation drops off a lot.
Well I'm a Southerner who is reflexively somewhat anti-union plus I had some really bad experiences with the UAW that cemented that view, so you are preaching to the choir.
But I don't want to come across as a crank on the topic, so limited my comment to a specific example where unions are very clearly harmful. =)
To be fair, pro-union people want all or most jobs to be unionized, or at least governed by a collecting bargaining agreement, as is the case in some European countries. So in theory everyone would benefit, not just a small number of unionized workers.
For sure I'm not sold on whether this would be a good thing, I wish Matt would do a piece on it actually.
That would address the issue of it being a small number getting the advantage of a union, but there's other issues to consider, too. For any given union, there are rents extracted to the benefit of the union members and the detriment of everyone else. If that were the only effect, then maybe economy-wide unionization would more or less even out. But those rents are also *inefficiently* extracted, making everyone poorer. Those countries in Europe with economy-wide unionization are much poorer than the United States.
I think it's clear that Matt is pro-union for political reasons, regardless of the economics.
When it comes to policy, Matt isn't a political hack. He holds positions because he believes the empirical evidence backs them up. He would never say "unions are good because lefties think so" - he certainly isn't afraid to critique lefties when he thinks they're wrong.
I'm skeptical of widespread unionization for the reasons you say. But yes, Matt does seem to be pro-union, so I wish he would do a piece making the case for it, beyond simply saying "the current US collective bargaining model is bad" - literally everyone already agrees on that, the only reason it persists is that the disagreements on an alternative model are too wide.
Matt has changed my mind on other issues, maybe he could do the same with unions. I would also love for someone to take a dive into why sectoral bargaining seems to work so well in Germany but so poorly for US automakers.
Good plug for a column!
I think the reason most people in the comments are not as pro-union as Democratic politicians is they're mostly college-educated well-off in demand knowledge/etc. workers who have never needed the specific backing of a union to help them or protect them.
I don't think Matt is a political hack, but I also think he is somewhat of a political realist. He recongizes that unions are a huge boost to the Democratic party, so he supports them for that reason, even if the economic case doesn't make much sense. Not because he's a party hack, but because the Democrats tend to advance causes he believes in.
American unions seem far more adversarial and far less interested in making sure their host companies are successful compared to German unions.
I think the fact that workers councils are illegal in the US is largely to blame for that.
Hasn't he already declared for strong unions with sectoral bargaining (Nordic Model)? Think it was a couple years ago so maybe worth a revisit in this era of higher inflation and interest rates.
Management and business owners are also trying to extract rents. It is neither unique to unions nor are they necessarily the most effective rent extractors at the expense of the larger population.
"Management and business owners are also trying to extract rents."
Yep, they sure are! Which is why we have anti-trust laws that explicitly make that rent-seeking behavior illegal. But we have laws that explicitly make union rent-seeking behavior protected. I think that's bad.
Look at WMATA. They have a fully automated system that they scrapped for one with drivers.
Because of a crash where automated driving wasn’t even implicated!
They're very slowly bringing it back! Probably by the end of this year!
What a farce
I don’t think we have the demonstrated technology for driverless light rail. We do have demonstrated technology for driverless fully grade separated rail, like the Vancouver skytrain and the new Honolulu system. But you have to design the system with full separation of the relevant sorts.
It would be interesting to know which, if any, cities in Japan or Korea or China or Taiwan have made any move to convert existing rail to driverless, to know how feasible this is. (I’m not aware of any such cities - I think Copenhagen and Paris have a few driverless lines, that were built driverless from the start.)
A couple of absolutely ancient Parisian lines (built before 1910!) have been automated, with no disruption in service to boot: https://www.urban-transport-magazine.com/en/conversion-without-service-interruption-paris-metro-line-4-now-fully-automated/
In the US, BART trains are fully automated for travel, with drivers only operating the doors at stations I believe that the main blocker to automating this (besides drivers' unions, ofc) is the cost of installing platform screen doors at all stations.
Paris has done a couple of conversions. But having worked on feasibility studies of similar projects in my city, the issue is quite simple - you'd need billions to retrofit (most) existing lines to make them suitable for automation, and if you had billions available for capital investment (you probably don't), the RoI would be *much* higher on other projects (including entirely new automated lines!), so no one wants to do it.
Given the ubiquity of car use in America, there will be a larger public call for increasing ease of use to car commuters with this technology. So I would be optimistic; the pressure for regulatory changes could very likely be faster and stronger. And then once people use AVs to get to work from wider sprawl (and thus more people), they'll want more reliable transit for the final commute in.
I think the idea of self-driving vehicles is very exciting. But I wonder about the use case being developed versus what I would find useful enough to pay for. Robotaxis don't seem to offer that much savings versus an Uber or Taxi itself -- the driver just isn't that much of the cost when compared to the capital costs of a Waymo.
On the other hand, it would be very, very helpful to be able to have a few drinks, hop in the car and let it drive me home rather than risk a DUI. Or plop the family in the car in DC at 11:00 PM and wake up at Grandma's house in Jacksonville at 7:00 AM, fully rested and ready to go.
It seems the technology and regulatory path to the use cases I describe above will be measured in decades rather than years, though.
Autonomously controlled vehicles will only ever get cheaper relative to human controlled ones. Thank Baumol!
Making DUI extinct and allowing red eye driving is one of the greatest potentials for automated vehicles.
I bet you scolds make it illegal to be intoxicated while occupying the “drivers seat” of an autonomous vehicle. This really is tragic, because reducing DUIs (and permitting freer and more joyous socializing in the suburbs) is a major part of the AV value proposition.
In fairness, this isn't just being a joyless scold; there is something to be said "no system is perfect, and if the car's control system goes on the fritz suddenly, a conscious human driver should be able to take over."
Of course, this also removes the possibility of sleeping in the car (red-eye driving), which would be another major use of autonomous vehicles, so... eh... I dunno? What is the cost-benefit ratio of "I want to get drunk and have my car drive me safely home" vs. "I may fall asleep in the car and never wake up if the driving system decides to break down at the wrong time"?
In safety engineering world, the man in the loop is often a key part of a redundant fault tolerant system.
Yet I wonder how alert we can really expect the 'driver' of an autonomous car to remain, such that they are able to quickly and correctly take over when the car goes on the fritz? Especially if it is presumably a very rare occurrence.
I would wager that even fairly diligent people will let their guard slip significantly.
I would never be interested in a self driving car that presumes I'm paying attention in it's safety protocols.
I _might_ if the car's procedure was to say "I can't handle this", pull over safely to a stop, and _then_ ask me to take over. But never if I have to do it spontaneously.
And even the situation I described also assumes I've been through Driver's Ed.
An intentionally designed self-driving car would have many layers of redundant software controls/mitigations...
...but to reduce the probability of a mishap into an acceptable range, you may also claim the driver/man-in-the-loop as another layer.
You don't have to do that, but if so you have to do a bunch of extra work on the software safety side to get the probabilities down.
"Yet I wonder how alert we can really expect the 'driver' of an autonomous car to remain, such that they are able to quickly and correctly take over when the car goes on the fritz? Especially if it is presumably a very rare occurrence."
Yes, this is a point that I've literally been bringing up for at least a decade in discussions about self-driving cars. Advocates for full self-drive frequently waive off questions about irreconcilable conflicts in safety commands and other issues by saying that the car will simply throw control back to the human driver, but, when I took driving classes many, many years ago, I remember being told that a driver has less than 2 seconds on average to react to an adverse event. Obviously, if you have a self-driving car that has to perform some sort of assessment of a situation and then return control to the driver, that's going to shorten the available time to react further (even if we're just talking milliseconds), so the system is (1) going to require a driver to be just as alert and aware as normal, while (2) simultaneously putting the driver into a state of tedium by relieving them of the hundreds or thousands of tiny adjustments a driver has to make under normal driving conditions.
Hell, I worry about delayed reactions even when taking my feet away from the pedal for a few seconds while using cruise control on the interstate.
And I at least still have my hands on the wheel.
But that's why I dont think we'll really get a slow incremental improvement path to these things.
It will either be truly excellent and safe 99.999% of the time, or it won't be on the market.
Eh... most truly fault tolerant systems are built around the idea that the human is *guaranteed* to make a mistake, so the machine should work regardless of whether the human screws up.
A country that thought adults should wear masks while socializing is unlikely to understand the benefits of communal drinking. Yet they are real.
Not entirely sure those are equivalent. I listened to Senator Chris Murphy speak the other week, and he talked a lot about the crisis of social isolation, etc. and he's a fairly normie Democrat.
Mask politics are tricky, and both sides got some stuff wrong in that debate. But I don't think that wholesale makes Democrats the ant-social policy. At least, I hope not...
I'm not denying communal drinking has benefits, I'm wondering where the tradeoff is between "I want to get drunk with my friends and then pass out in my car" vs. "I want to stay awake and aware so I could take over if Murphy's Law happens on my way home."
This can be answered almost a priori. Autonomous cars are safer than sober humans. Ergo, any policy regime should definitely try to substitute autonomous cars for drunk humans.
All of this discussion is moot if the cars need a backup human driver.
Sounds like something the "morally superior" Right is more apt to do rather then the "decadent and debauched" Left. \S
Why would you want to be in the drivers seat if you're drunk? Lie down in back. "Freer and more joyous" (by which I assume you mean "drunken") socializing is already a thing in the suburbs and can be accomplished in the front passenger or any of the rear seats.
As likely, expect many of these features to be gated by a subscription cost.
Why do you say the driver just isn’t that much cost compared to the capital? If your driver needs to make $15 an hour, and the vehicle goes 10 miles per hour, for 100,000 miles, then the cost of the driver is $150,000 over the life of the vehicle. If the vehicle can get a longer life than 100,000 miles, or the driver gets more expensive, then the budget available for the capital expense to become a savings gets larger.
The challenge here is that present dollars are more expensive than future dollars, so 150k up front is going to cost you more than 150k over the lifetime of the vehicle (because of interest or equivalent financing cost paid or forgone.)
That said, labor is expensive enough and capital is cheap enough that your autonomous vehicle doesn't need to be *that* cheap up front for things to pencil out. And because robotaxis don't require as much downtime as human drivers, you can at least theoretically get good revenue-miles in fairly quickly.
Plus, labor is variable while the upfront costs are fixed, so the payoff under uncertainty is heavily skewed toward variable costs.
For taxis / ubers / robotaxis you have to denominate and compare everything in costs per mile. Robotaxis can accumulate miles and recover capital costs much faster than either taxis or ubers, and it's not yet clear that their initial capital cost will be even 2x the capital cost of those human-driven vehicles. I don't expect the expensive, multi-sensor approach of Waymo to survive unless sensor costs drop dramatically.
Great point...also capital costs are much easier to innovate down and often have savings at scale versus personnel costs (which tend to go up).
AVs probably cost way more than $150,000 today. But in 10 years they'll probably be that cheap, and in 20 years the automation parts will probably be <$10,000
I wish a self-driving car was an option for my dad, who really shouldn't be driving anymore (at least, not without a backup that can automatically take over if he gets distracted or falls asleep) but doesn't want to give it up. I'm sure a lot of older folks are in the same boat, especially as more boomers reach their 70s and soon 80s.
But unfortunately it sounds like that type of usage is pretty far away as well.
My Dad is in his mid 70s and lives in the suburbs of orange county. He and my mom frequently drive to LA to visit my sister and her grandkids. He purchased a Tesla Model 3 a few years ago without the full self driving software. There was a recent update to the software that has been such a significant inlmprovement that they gave him a free 1 month trial of full self driving. He and my mom have been using it to drive door to door from OC to LA with no issues. The software still requires supervision but even at this point he trusts it more than my mom's driving and he chooses to use it because it puts him in the role of an observing passenger and reduces driver fatigue. He is now no longer worried about needing to move out when he is no longer able to drive reliably.
This is a great use case and good example of how the current, imperfect version of FSD can still provide benefits. I have been using the same trial for the last few weeks and while I agree that "supervising" is much less taxing than driving, I am still surprised by the number of mistakes the current (12.3) version makes. I get at least one significant mistake per trip (wrong turn despite correct mapping) and one scary error every 5 trips or so (veering off-map to follow train tracks intersecting a street at grade at a 45 degree angle). It's impossible for me to know how close this version is to "real" FSD that does not require supervision at the technical level, but it does not feel "decades" away by any means.
This is a real problem that forces many older people to put themselves and others at risk. It's shocking how difficult it can be for an elderly person to get by without a car, even in a relatively compact and service-rich independent living community. We are currently going through this with my wife's 92 year old mother in SoCal. We were able to convince her to give up driving (with some help from the DMV) and have had pretty good luck with a service called "gogograndparents", which offers uber and lyft services with drivers trained to expect and cater to elderly clients, as well as a phone number to book rides for non-app savvy seniors. Not a perfect solution by any means, but might be good enough. Good luck!
I think the capital-intensive Waymo model is going to lose. The cheap Tesla model will win. Then the capital cost is a drop in the bucket compared to paying the driver. And then the transition can happen very, very quickly.
it certainly seems that lots of people (even very smart folks in the space) have just completely written them off for quite arbitrary reasons without even considering the quite real advantages the business model has in terms of cost structure / scalability...
I definitely agree that if Tesla solves self-driving in a fully generalized way, it’ll be a huge win for the company and its business model.
But the bear case is worth discussing here. This is a problem with very high execution difficulty— significantly harder than working out a patchwork of effective local solutions. And in its own way, it’s actually also going to be very capital-intensive to solve— as the evolution of language models etc has shown, incremental improvements in neural network performance tend to require increasing compute and training data inputs by orders of magnitude (eg: GPT-4 has about ten times as many parameters as GPT-3), and it’s far from clear that Tesla will get to acceptable fully-generalized performance before these scaling costs get prohibitive. Management’s record of over-promising and under-delivering in this domain many, many times also makes it a lot harder for investors to trust that they actually have a good handle on the problem and a good path to solving it. I don’t think it’s impossible that they pull it off, but there actually are good reasons to be skeptical.
The advantage of the solve-more-limited-cases Waymo approach is that we know it actually works with feasible levels of compute and training data.
Tesla actually has an order of magnitude more data to work with than anyone else (over 1.3 billiion miles of driving data, versus Waymo's 40 million).
Additionally, from a capital stand point...Tesla has been lucky to (somehow?) subsidize this by getting people to pay thousands of dollars a head to beta test the software for them...rather than rely on low wage test drivers to drive in circles on a map.
Per Elon, they are "no longer compute limited" on the training side and the most recent cadence of FSD revisions has proven that (there is a new one going out every 2 weeks, it seems), so it seems like most of that capital has already been spent.
I'm guessing the take up will probably follow a similar path to cars themselves. I get the sense in popular imagination, cars as a mass-produced product widely available to the masses was a quicker process than it really was. Henry Ford and the Model T is held up historically for a variety of reasons, but I think one misconception that's been created about the Model T is that it allowed us to go from a world where everything was horse and carriage to suddenly everyone had a car. But by the end of the 20s, still only 25% of Americans families had a car. https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtid=2&psid=3396#:~:text=In%201929%2C%20a%20quarter%20of,the%20American%20way%20of%20life.
I bring this all up because I think Matt makes a pretty good case that we're in the 1918-1920 stage with driverless cars. Once they allowed on highways, it really will be the case that there is a real use case to take a driverless car over an Uber. Even if we are faraway from everyone owning a driverless car outright, I think we are on the cusp sooner than you think of driverless cars fundamentally changing the nature of urban and suburban living just like Model-T cars did in the 20s.
forget what consumers find useful: trucks is where the true savings are
Until there's competition between multiple robotaxi companies in the same market, there's no real reason for a robotaxi company to charge much less than what a human-driven taxi would cost.
“On the other hand, it would be very, very helpful to be able to have a few drinks, hop in the car and…”
…have a few more.
I remember seeing a study a few years ago where some researchers hired chauffeured cars for a group of people to simulate how people would use privately owned AVs. The big takeaways were that total VMT increased ~50%, trip volume increased 25%, and 80% of the number of new trips were deadheading (driving the car with no passengers in it). Transit usage cratered among people with access to a private AV. I’d be nervous of broad based adoption of private AVs without a major congestion tax to manage demand on our roads - the increase in VMT and deadheading would cause huge snarls of congestion without a way to manage it.
Beat me to it: this is the article. [https://jalopnik.com/zombie-miles-and-napa-weekends-how-a-week-with-chauffe-1839648416]
I too was amazed that Matt didn't consider the zombie miles problem, and that, as Nathan just said, didn't consider that cars not in parking spaces still have to be physically present somewhere. And yes, I'm guessing that Matt would just counter with congestion pricing, and that's fine, but there's a limit to how effective cars, automated or not, can travel with all the merging and intersections that occur. At some point, there's no way getting around the need for mass transit.
It seems plausible AVs empower much more aggressive sprawl outside a city with commuting to a mass transit stop (bus or light rail) for the final 30 minutes. In fact, a few zombie miles to a charging location could help solve the parking problem that would otherwise hinder this mass adoption for dropping off at a bus or train station to work.
I don't see why that would be the case. When people originally got cars and spread out into the suburbs, that did not spur the development of train stations with big parking lots so they could commute into the city... it spurred the development of suburban office parks (where most American jobs now are), and the replacement of many buildings in America's downtown cores with parking, for the jobs that remained. The jobs sprawled too.
In the UK cities have been introducing low and ultra low emission zones. You're vehicle must be more efficient than some standard or you need to pay a (hefty) fee to drive into the zone. I think it was started in London and has since been rolled out to more cities so it can't be completely politically toxic.
I could see these type of schemes ratcheting up until driving to mass transit station on the outskirts will be cheaper and more convenient than driving all the way to the centre.
I think there is enough in the centre (as opposed to in the suburban office parks) to make that worthwhile
But when the suburban office park took off, there wasn't much remote office work possible to do and the car needed to be driven by the occupant. If both of those variables change for a fraction of workers, you end up with a different calculation.
If anything the move to remote work has intensified the desire for short, simple commutes when people do go in. The pattern we've seen since COVID is that office occupancy has been hit harder in city centers than suburbs. Few people are going to want to mess around with transferring to a train to a dense job center when they could just commute to an office in or near their suburb - whether the first part of the trip is in a self driving car or not.
It seems like the zombie miles problem is a problem of sole ownership vs highly available on demand per-trip renting?
If I own an AV, it's going to do zombie miles for me, and also sit around and do nothing a lot too.
I thought the dream is more like yellow cabs in Manhattan - they're just everywhere, they're hopefully mostly doing useful work, and they're so plentiful the service seems on demand.
Right, as soon as I read the words "you don't need a parking space" I knew there was trouble, because that means that the cars are taking up space on the roads instead. There aren't secret out-of-everybody's-way parking alcoves that AVs would disappear to during downtime; they'd just keep roving around, and we have solid research on TNCs (Uber and Lyft and so on) that that's exactly what happens.
They can of course double, triple, quadruple... park since they can just wake up and shuffle themselves around when one needs to enter service. So while "no parking space" may be an exaggeration, it could still be transformational to land use.
We would end up building those out of the way parking spots, but it would take time. Eventually having a big garage every few blocks would be Waymo efficient than the current system of street parking.
Wow
If these are zero emission vehicles (electric yes, but tires also produce emissions, that's still a problem that needs solving) and they're cruising slowly and safely, I'm not sure deadheading is a big problem.
Two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Deadheading is going to make congestion worse, if nothing else.
For robo taxis, I wouldn’t think so. If demand is high, ie a time of high traffic, there won’t be much deadheading. Pickups and drop offs would be close. If demand is low there would be some deadheading, but then it wouldn’t matter as much. Deadheading is definitely an unintended consequence of this tech that needs to be monitored.
In the robotaxi vision, existing roads become the new parking lots. During peak, the robos are all driving on the road, during lull, those robos that are still working can easily and safely navigate around the "waiting" robos that are parked in the same roads. But this vision is not fully compatible with a "mixed" system of robos and human drivers, so you will need some version of private vehicle / human driver bans to make it work. This is hugely inefficient land use when compared to transit's footprint, but as a society we have consistently chosen the convenience (and personal efficiency) of door-to-door transport over land use efficiency, so I think that will probably continue.
"Liked" in part for use of "deadheading" -- a term I unselfconsciously use on occasion at work (a law firm) and then have to deal with blank looks from everyone else.
For anyone who does the New York Times spelling bee, it’s useful to know that DEADHEADED is always present whenever HEAD is.