Prosperity Comes from Eliminating Jobs, Not Saving Them

As long as there’s new jobs with similar pay. Somebody has to buy the stuff that’s being produced more efficiently. Otherwise it all winds down. And I can’t see most governments giving cash away to live to those displaced by technology.

Can’t have a consumer economy without consumers.

This article is one of those “technically true” things I’m tired of hearing about from modern economics. It’s technically true we could retrain all white collar folks who lose their jobs to LLMs to work in blue collar work, it’s technically true that the glut of new folks wouldn’t cause wages to go down, it’s technically true that once we have all that economic productivity it could be redistributed to make everyone more prosperous.

As many a wise man has said before me, gdp doesn’t reflect prosperity on the ground, or put another way:

Two economists are walking in a forest when they come across a pile of shit.

The first economist says to the other “I’ll pay you $100 to eat that pile of shit.” The second economist takes the $100 and eats the pile of shit.

They continue walking until they come across a second pile of shit. The second economist turns to the first and says “I’ll pay you $100 to eat that pile of shit.” The first economist takes the $100 and eats a pile of shit.

Walking a little more, the first economist looks at the second and says, "You know, I gave you $100 to eat shit, then you gave me back the same $100 to eat shit. I can't help but feel like we both just ate shit for nothing."

"That's not true", responded the second economist. "We increased the GDP by $200!"