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Comment by dehrmann | Hacker News Reader

The farming quote is interesting, but one of the Jevons paradox requirements is a highly elastic demand curve, and food is inelastic.

The open questions right now are how much of a demand is there for more software, and where do AI capabilities plateau.

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Either way, as quite visibility seen by all the late-1800s mansions still lining the country roads, the era of farmers being "overpaid", as the link puts it, came about 50-75 years after the combine was invented. If the metaphor is to hold, we can assume that developers are currently poor as compared to what the LLM future holds for them.

But, there is a key distinction that we would be remiss to not take note of: By definition, farmers are the owners of the business. Most software developers aren't owners, just lowly employees. If history is to repeat, it is likely that, as usual, the owners are those who will prosper from the advancement.

Reported numbers vary but household food waste seems to be fairly high in developed economies, so food demand might be more elastic than intuition would expect.

I've seen consistent values for food waste reported for at least the past 40 years, if not the past 80, in various sources. I suspect it's something of a constant. One observation I've seen is that food wastage now occurs far later in the processing cycle, which is to say, after far more resources (transport, processing, refrigeration, cooking) have been invested in it.

In the long term, food demand is elastic in that populations tend to grow.

> in that populations tend to grow.

That's no longer happening.

I thought that world wide on average populations were still growing quite a bit

Perhaps we should say something like "food demand has an elasticity floor."

For sure.

demand for food is very elastic. if beef becomes more expensive, cheaper protein options get more demand (chicken, pork, tofu, beans).

fruits and all non-essential food items are famously very elastic, and constitute large share of the spending.

for example: if cheap cereal becomes abundant, it is only at the cost of poor quality, so demand for high quality cereal will increase.

the LLM driven software engineering will continuously increase the bar for quality and demand for high quality software

Demand for eaten calories is not very elastic but plentiful food crops lead to piping crops through the wasteful, environmentally harmful & unethical thingthat is meat production.

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