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Comment by eru | Hacker News Reader

What is problematic about this?

If 500 silicon valley engineers can replace 100,000 travel agents earning $50,000, then you have 500 silicon valley engineers earning $10m and 100,000 unemployed travel agents.

In fact, the stable boy and hay industry has never recovered after the introduction of the Ford model T.

Which is fine, as long as you're not the stable boy, don't care about the stable boy, and don't live in a democracy where the stable boy gets a vote.

Right, but the lesson is that we ought to look after the stable boy, not that the invention of cars was a bad idea.

The crucial side-effect of most productivity-increasing inventions is marginalization of most of the work force (barring the few lucky ones - the SV engineers in the case of XXI century), destruction of communities and concentration of wealth and power in fewer hands. The luddites were definitely onto something. Wendell Bell explored these ideas in detail in his writing, if anyone is interested in learning more.

Yeah which is why it's stated as a problem to be solved, not some immutable fact of life. The issue is that we've seen incredibly little progress in this area. There have been studies on the British coal mines that shuttered under Thatcher - the areas are still not back to the level of employment they had before the mines were shut. It's fine to say that shuttering those mines was a good thing - it probably was. It's also factual to say that those who felt the negative effects didn't benefit from the advantages of government policy, and ina human sense beyond employment numbers it means a lot of those people never worked again.

If you mean force others to take care of the stable boy, then no, it can not be moral.

What is moral and also efficient and kind is not standing in the way of him finding another occupation - to remove all regulation that hinders someone from providing value

Which is fine, as long as you don't mind being outcompeted and replaced by a system that is able to phase out stable boys.

You nailed it - statist democracy is having control over vast amounts of weapons, and forcing your way into the wallet of your neighbour, rather than competing and providing value to others.

Ford model T did not compete with stable boys and hay industry. It competed with horses and no, they never recovered.

500 sv engineers earning $500k. Most of the savings passed on to consumers.

Expedia is based in Seattle, London and India. As far as I know, they don't pay SV FAANG salaries.

The whole point is that the engineers all taken together would make less than the travel agents all taken together.

That's where the consumer surplus and company profit come from.

Second: freeing up the work of 99,500 people would be awesome! You know that nearly everyone used to be a farmer back in the day? Surprisingly, the world today is not made up of 70%+ unemployed farmers?

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