When agriculture was invented, it put a bunch of hunter gatherers out of business. They weren't happy about it, they liked being hunters and gatherers.
But that surplus workforce found jobs in other areas, creating whole industries where there had been nothing. Can't have Post-mates without workers and restaurants. Can't have restaurants without more workers and food distribution. Can't have food distribution without more workers and food processors... etc.
Ivy league english majors get jobs writing TV and movie scripts. Mass electronic distribution means that many many people get to watch the creative output of a small number of people. All the other people who used to write are available to fill new niches in the economy.
Yep, the transition is difficult, and they'll complain about it, but society as a whole benefits.
150 years ago the agricultural sector employed roughly 80% of American workers. Today, it employs less than 3%. It may be hard to imagine looking forward rather than back, but dynamic economies are capable of experiencing such dramatic shifts AND of absorbing and reallocating the labor towards more productive uses. They key thing to understand is that once certain modes of production become less efficient relative to alternatives, often because of technological advances, it frees our resources and productive energies to engage in new enterprises. It's true that employment dislocations that occur from rapid technological advancement can cause great transitional distress; that is why it's important as a society that we find humane and efficient ways of supporting people through these changes. However, the net result of progress is that we are all better off. No one can say exactly what the baristas or the project managers of today will become, no more than anyone could have predicted what would have become of the farmworkers who were displaced in the great migration towards a service economy. But, the last 150 years have seen a veritable explosion in the specialization and profusion of occupations which were previously economically unviable. I see no reason why we should not expect the same kind of evolution going forward.
The number of professions don't go up, and will certainly diminish in the future. Switching professions as a young person without a dependent family is not all that hard. But as a family father/mother, it's not always possible to spend the time to switch professions. Today most of the jobs have qualification, experience and age requirements.
> There is certainly temporary pain endured by workers who are displaced by the innovation. But it is folly to subsidize work that is no longer in demand.
That should not mean the transition could not be smoothened, though.
Let me comment on your example. In todays economy things are sold, not shared. So I need to have something to give in return for the fish that the fisherman (the guy with the fishing rod) gives me. I can dive for scallops. But another guy comes with a scallop-collecting machine and the fisherman does not need my scallops anymore, as he can buy from him cheaper. So I start guarding their stocks for them in return for fish and scallops to eat. But then they invent an automated system for defence of their stock, so my labour is unnecessary now. I need to eat, so I start farming, and as I can't live on herbs merely, I trade some of my crop for fish and scallops. But one day they start importing it from another island for cheaper, and stop buying from me. I can't support my farm year-round just on my crops, so I switch to herding a flock of sheep, and trade meat for fish, scallops, and herbs. But someone comes and builds a modern meat production plant, and I can't sell cheaper than him, so I'm out of business. Given I can't live on my herds' meat only, I need to move on. And while the island slowly thrives with newcomers as the services are increasing and life is becoming easier, the amount of my opportunities diminish. Finally I start up a little market where I sell stuff that I import and/or buy from local providers in order to earn the money to buy fish, scallops, herbs, meat and other stuff. But comes a big coop and drives me out of business. I resort to taxi driving in order to survive, but apps and ridesharing replace my business. I go around seeking a job, in factories, coops, fishmongers, etc., and I find a job as a cashier in the local coop. But an automatic cash largely diminishes necessity of a cashier, so, I'm moved to the big depot of the coop. There, automation, growingly replaces the need for human labor, and as I'm rather inexperienced, I'm laid off. Because they don't want me to become a hobo and pose 'em a threat, some institution gives me 'unemployment money', so that I can survive. I don't want to survive, I want to live, but I lost the chance to become a white-collar while I was trying to catch on, I didn't have the time to focus on one thing and become a professional. So I sort of live as a dependent of the social welfare system, barely surviving, without human dignity. Furthermore, I'm excluded from some parts of community by social code, and am informally a second-class citizen, as I live off the taxes of others. A family is merely a dream for me, as I don't have the money to support it. And should I already have a family, my kids and my partner are at least frustrated at me as I'm a dysfunctional member of the family, though it's also possible that I'm excluded.
We went from putting every ounce of labor into hunting/gathering/building shelter for oneself and one's family to early civilization where the surplus of resources generated by agriculture (i.e. technology) caused a labor surplus that allowed for new kinds of jobs to arise. More recently, the US went from 80% farmers at the time of the Revolution to 2% now. Along the way the definition of "low-level labor" and "skilled labor" changed; you'd be hard-pressed to get a job even at McDonald's or in a factory, if you're completely illiterate in modern America. It's hard to argue that these changes weren't for the better, for _everybody_, including those at the bottom of the new order. The bottom of society today is orders of magnitude better off than the middle of society in 1790, and we owe that pretty much entirely to technological advance. There are of course speed bumps along the way, and a generation of workers that are not skilled enough for the new order will have a hard time, but in a healthy economy, it's the role of the state to smooth that path using the resources that the economy at large gains from the advances in efficiency and wealth.
I'm a little skeptical of the idea that this wave of technology must be different from all the ones in the past (which isn't to say it's impossible) and obsolete jobs completely. Programming literacy may simply become the new literacy; Education may very well have to become a longer stage of life, but given lengthening lifespans, it won't necessarily be a drastically higher proportion of one's life than it has been in the past.
by moving from hunter-gatherer economies (where every single person was engaged in food production) to agriculture, and then from agriculture to mechanized agribusiness, we created a vast pool of unemployed humans (like 90 to 99% of the human race) who were available to do all sorts of other things, basically everything in the economy that is not food production. The REAL issue there was the availability of the jobless to do new work. To that vast list of productive economic activities we soon will be able to add jobs for newly-former drivers.
That really is how it works and it really is not an issue, other than it is what has "paved the way" for our modern high income, high nutrition, high health (by historical standards) lifestyles.
So, when we came up with agriculture some millenia ago, all those jobless people, those hunters/explorers/etc., did not stay jobless, did they? What about when we came up with machines in the 19th century? All those people in agriculture would still be jobless, but they are not, are they?
Point is, every technological innovation will be absorbed in the long term. It's been historically this way for millennia, at least. People are very good at reinventing themselves as long as they have an incentive (food, money) to do so.
interesting essay, but you could have made the exact same argument in the early years of the industrial revolution...as one example. 'The real problem with the economy is that it doesn't need you anymore' could have been said, and probably was said, many, many times throughout history, every time big technological changes appeared on the horizon.
agriculture? sorry hunter gatherer, the economy doesn't need you anymore :)
We've had massive realignments of the labor force before. At one point agriculture was the industry that all of society was built around. Nowadays, it is a small part of tge economy, with most people having little more than a surface understanding of how it works.
These realignments are generally not pretty, but hardly civilization ending.
At worst, this realignment will see humans go the way of horses after the automobile instead of farmers after the industrial revolution. That is to say, at some point, there may be not be new jobs for humans to pivot into. However even that is not an existential threat to civilization. It is a threat to democratic capitalism; but civilization existed before democratic capitalism, and will continue to exist after it.
Having said that, the claim that this latest technological innovation will finally push humans out of the labor force has been made before; and I don't see any reason yet to think that this time will be different.
It's not so much that there won't be a labor market, but rather than radical changes to the labor market are accelerating.
Two centuries ago, well over 90% of income earners were farmers. Today, it's like 2% and dropping. But unemployment didn't become a more massive problem than it was then. Labor became available for other purposes, enabling the industrial revolution.
I'm not sure this is wrong, but I think it's worth recognizing the two major objections.
1. Capital ownership and opportunity: All of the careers you mention could absorb many more workers in terms of available tasks (something like teaching could easy grow 10x), but that doesn't justify a claim that they will. The farming transition was enabled by mass ownership of productivity gains - careers like entertainment expanded massively because lots of demand was newly available to support that supply. The Picketty school of thought argues that this isn't inevitable; it's possible that a few kids get one on one education, and a bunch of people starve because wealth concentration means there aren't enough buyers for their work.
More specifically, the rich won't buy arbitrary amounts of services because their time and desires are not unbounded. Even 1-on-1 teaching can only employ one teacher-hour per buyer-hour, and the returns on 'background support' don't really justify having 50 people make one lesson plan at living wages.
2. Capability: Take a look at all of the careers you outlined there. They're all skilled-service work, most of which requires having more of some trait than your customer. Teachers need knowledge, counselors need insight, care workers need knowledge or patience and emotional reserves. Crucially, a lot of this is relative - it's not enough for a teacher to know things, they have to have knowledge their customer doesn't have and does desire. Factory labor took some specialized knowledge, but the transition from "a strong back for working fields" to "a strong back for milling cotton" was far less extreme.
This is the sort of two-sided market that's hard to stumble in to. I'm not saying most people can't learn an employable social/service skill, but if you lose your factory job you can't just accept a low wage to work as a teacher. There are significant time and price barriers in that transition, and it's not clear that they'll be overcome without non-market intervention. Markets are wonderfully efficient, but they can certainly decide that it's not worth retraining someone instead of letting them starve.
We've hit Peak Hunter/Gatherer and a Farmer Wants Your Job. Now What?
This has been going on ever since humans started thinking up better or different ways of doing things. Maybe we don't need as many money managers and brokers doing work that is done cheaper and better with technology. We will still need some, but not as many. There will be new areas where smart, driven people can make a great living.
This has always been the case in times of great change, because relatively few people a.) recognize the change as important and b.) are able to adapt their skillset to take advantage of it quickly. I remember going to college in the early 2000s, post dot-com crash and during the height of globalization, and hearing that computer programmers were the new serfs and financiers or war profiteers would all be living their cushy lives on our backs. Similar periods have existed throughout history, eg. during the 1930s everyone in an industry connected to the automobile (UAW, parts suppliers, road builders, even gas station attendants) made out like bandits while small independent farmers basically starved.
We may yet see social upheaval, but ultimately the last holdouts in old industries will realize that resistance is futile and retrain in new industries. That in turn will increase the supply of labor in those profitable fields, which will drive wages down to a more normal level, and equilibrium will be restored. Until the next technological revolution, at least.
Consider also that in the past, many of the jobs shifts took place on a generational scale. A farmer--instead of having 10 children that were farmers or farmers' wives, and one that was a non-farmer--would have one child (or less) that became a farmer, and the rest would become non-farmers.
The economy changed slowly enough that you could have the same job your entire life and not be suddenly unemployed or unemployable when the technology changed.
After the industrial revolution, the pace of economic change accelerated. You can now make an entire job obsolete in a shorter period of time than the ~50 years it would take for a new worker to reach a socially acceptable retirement age. And what is that person going to do for a living? Can they afford to restart their lives from the second-lowest rung on the ladder?
I have similar feeling. Heck, invention of farming have caused many the hunters and gatherers to lose their jobs!
I can't believe how "taking away jobs" sort of argument against technological advancement keeps showing up over and over, despite being refuted every time.
You're making an assumption here that no higher level jobs would arise. History tells us that is a fallacy. In 1800s more than 70% of the workforce was engaged in agriculture. Today it's 1-2% in the US. However, the others are not just sitting on their asses. There are jobs available today which simply were not conceivable back then (programmer, animation designer yadda yadda).
Agricultural technology already replaced most manual human jobs (from the era when most human jobs were agricultural). Humans found other things to do, and we found ways to use the surplus.
If it gets to the point where there isn't any unskilled labor left to do, we can always choose as a society to vastly expand the welfare state and divvy up at least part of the accumulated surplus to everyone. We have already moved in this direction a bit, and I expect to see more things along the lines of guaranteed minimum income in the future.
You only have to go back a little over 100 years to a time when agriculture accounted for over 50% of human labor. Now it's under 2%. Yet unemployment is still under 5%.
While agriculture likely represents the largest shift in labor during the 1900s, there were a huge number of jobs automated away during that time. Assembly lines, factories, and automation have been displacing workers since the dawn of the industrial age.
75 years ago there were basically no information technology jobs, and now it represents nearly 10% of the workforce, or four times the level of agricultural employment.
In summary, I agree with you; freeing people from mundane labor will lead to an explosion of jobs for which people are better suited; jobs which are more engaging and fulfilling as well.
There are always people who fail to adapt and get left behind, but the rest of the world moves on. People like to work.
Regards agriculture: there remain countries in which the vast majority (over 90%) of the population is engaged in agriculture. Much agricultural productivity has come through vastly increased inputs and capital, and not all countries have access to or can afford these.
The excess labor from agriculture was absorbed into other fields (so to speak). Not always painlessly -- working conditions in early Industrial Revolution factories were terrible (see Toynbee and Carlyle for descriptions, as well as, of course, Dickens). But once the kinks were worked out, we ended up with carpenters and welders and artists and writers and dog walkers.
My own view is that we're starting to run a bit far in that direction, but the coming shortage of raw materials and energy will likely address that problem for us, if not how many would prefer it be done.
But that surplus workforce found jobs in other areas, creating whole industries where there had been nothing. Can't have Post-mates without workers and restaurants. Can't have restaurants without more workers and food distribution. Can't have food distribution without more workers and food processors... etc.
Ivy league english majors get jobs writing TV and movie scripts. Mass electronic distribution means that many many people get to watch the creative output of a small number of people. All the other people who used to write are available to fill new niches in the economy.
Yep, the transition is difficult, and they'll complain about it, but society as a whole benefits.
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