Hacker News Reader

Comment by mseebach | Hacker News Reader

For future reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment#Earl...

The Luddites were skilled laborers who protested technological change that made it possible for their work to be done by a larger subset of the population, spreading the wealth formerly concentrated within the Luddites.

Today's technological change is making it possible for many people's work to be done by an ever-smaller number of people, concentrating the formerly distributed wealth in their hands.

It seems to me that the technological change during the time of the Luddites was helpful for most people, while the technological changes occurring today is nearing a point where it is no longer helpful for most people, with respect to employment/unemployment. Sure, there will be 'new forms of commerce' etc. etc. but if the unskilled labor does not have the training/hardware/human-network-access to participate, what does it matter?

rollypolly has a good point below that birth rates dropping can counteract this shrinking of the number of 'jobs' available. It's a perverse situation - can we die fast enough so that our jobs/roles are released to the few new people being born?

The makers of the machines that the Luddites protested must be assumed to have been an even higher skilled, smaller subset than the Luddites, thus equivalent to todays engineers/software developers etc.

It's obviously hard to be deterministic about but I would think it is safe to assume that having the unemployed Luddites 200 years distant helps a lot in deeming the technological developments then more "helpful" than the development today.

The machines that replaced the Luddites made it possible for a fashion industry to come into existence. That in turn created a couple orders of magnitude more jobs than were displaced by the jobs lost by the Luddites

Similarly, the number jobs in existence around cars dwarfs the number of jobs lost from no longer using horses.

I'm sure there are other examples.

The problem is most articles complaining about the loss of one type of job only compare them to the direct effects (loss of cloth maker jobs vs maintenance of cloth making machine jobs). It's never that simple.

Similarly, the number jobs in existence around cars dwarfs the number of jobs lost from no longer using horses.

Some 90% of the population worked on farms before the horse was displaced. The automotive industry is significant, but not anywhere near that significant.

Yes, the true benefit of automating and scaling agriculture was the freeing up of vast swathes of the population for being factory workers, thus enabling the industrial revolution. Which was that significant.

The birth rate argument doesn't hold water -- the folks with low birthrates are the same middle class people who are losing their livelihoods. A third child means that a middle class family loses the second car and cable sports package.

Poor people have high birthrates. The marginal cost of another kid doesn't really leave them any worse off. The average woman in Afghanistan has like 6 kids, for example.

Thanks for that. Honestly, I sometimes wonder how such articles make it to the top of HN. Is it because people believe the ideas are "worth spreading", or simply to show how badly written pieces they are? This baffles me.

And journalists who have never dealt with business whatsoever should seriously think twice before writing about new great theories of theirs. I don't think everyone necessarily needs to be an expert at something to have an opinion, but this kind of argument has been so over-used in the past that even a 5 minutes research should convince them it's nothing worth writing about.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com