Yes, I saw data once. Everyone likes to parrot the concept that past industrial revolutions lead to all sorts of new jobs and the economy kicking it up a gear. But the jobs never pivot. The jobs are lost. A generation or two is disrupted, and worse off before their children and garandchildren see any benefit
That’s ok, because their misery and poverty lets us sit back from the distance of a century and claim it was all for the better
The industrial revolution began in Britain around 1760, but living standards for most people did not meaningfully improve until the late 19th century, they even fell in the first few decades.
That’s over an entire century, or at least four to five generations for meaningful improvement.
The issue isn’t that there are zero jobs. The issue is that there are far, far fewer jobs after automation and there are not other options.
We have massively reduced farm labor through automation, but people moved to industrial manufacturing. Manufacturing automation moved labor to office work and service jobs. In both there are still some people who design, build, and maintain the machinery, but they are a small fraction of what came before. We don’t have additional jobs waiting to be filled, and with big increases in automation it will be easier to automate any new potential source of labor.
This could be avoided by universal income and health care and other approaches where the general public benefits from all this automation, but the environment that pushes the automation gives them the power to keep that from happening.
deleted by creator
How many car jobs are there now compared to however many horse jobs there used to be?
I feel like it’s many many fewer jobs, and the horse jobs did more of a disappearance than a pivot. But I don’t know it.
Does anyone here have data?
Yes, I saw data once. Everyone likes to parrot the concept that past industrial revolutions lead to all sorts of new jobs and the economy kicking it up a gear. But the jobs never pivot. The jobs are lost. A generation or two is disrupted, and worse off before their children and garandchildren see any benefit
That’s ok, because their misery and poverty lets us sit back from the distance of a century and claim it was all for the better
The industrial revolution began in Britain around 1760, but living standards for most people did not meaningfully improve until the late 19th century, they even fell in the first few decades.
That’s over an entire century, or at least four to five generations for meaningful improvement.
deleted by creator
The issue isn’t that there are zero jobs. The issue is that there are far, far fewer jobs after automation and there are not other options.
We have massively reduced farm labor through automation, but people moved to industrial manufacturing. Manufacturing automation moved labor to office work and service jobs. In both there are still some people who design, build, and maintain the machinery, but they are a small fraction of what came before. We don’t have additional jobs waiting to be filled, and with big increases in automation it will be easier to automate any new potential source of labor.
This could be avoided by universal income and health care and other approaches where the general public benefits from all this automation, but the environment that pushes the automation gives them the power to keep that from happening.