Hacker News Reader

Comment by Palomides | Hacker News Reader

>every "no-code will replace developers" wave actually creates more developer jobs, not fewer

you mean "created", past tense. You're basically arguing it's impossible for technical improvements to reduce the number of programmers in the world, ever. The idea that only humans will ever be able to debug code or interpret non-technical user needs seems questionable to me.

View on HN

This doesn’t seem immediately false. Industrial society creates more complexity and specializations. There is more work to do all the time.

Actual AI seems like a possibility here.

Also the percentage of adults working has been dropping for a while. Retired used to be a tiny fraction of the population that’s no longer the case, people spend more time being educated or in prison etc.

Overall people are seeing a higher standard of living while doing less work.

> Also the percentage of adults working has been dropping for a while.

There are lots of negative reasons for this that aren’t efficiency. Aging demographics. Poor education. Increasing complexity leaves people behind.

Efficiency is why things continue to work as fewer people work. Social programs, bank account, etc are just an abstraction you need a surplus or the only thing that changes is who starves.

Social programs often compensate for massive distortion in the economy. For example, SNAP benefits both the poor and the businesses where SNAP funds is spent on, but that's because a lot of unearned income goes to landowners, while preventing people from employing laborers and starting businesses. SNAP merely ameliorate a situation that shouldn't had arise in the first place.

So, yes, reasons other than efficiency explain why people aren't working, as well why there are still poor people.

Only the relatively tiny homeless population is poor by historic standards. And that’s almost exclusively mental health issues and addiction.

Now we can set arbitrary thresholds for what standard of living every American should have but even knowing people on SNAP it’s not that low.

> Only the relatively tiny homeless population is poor by historic standards.

The cost to participate in society is much greater.

Yeah we do have more cars. But you also need to buy one to go to work.

We have education, but you need 22 years to be employable.

It’s probably not with continuing the discussion if you don’t believe poverty exists as a concept.

Millions of working Americans don’t have cars. Also, you can make the median wage in the US without any collage education.

Poverty still exists, but vast inflation of what is considered’a basic standard of living’ hides a great deal of progress. People want to redefine illiteracy to mean being unable to use the internet not by the standards of the past.

> Millions of working Americans don’t have cars.

How would you describe the level of wealth of those Americans outside of metro areas?

Literally across the full spectrum. A surprising number of communities exist outside the US road network.

> Efficiency is why things continue to work as fewer people work.

Yes, but it’s not why there are fewer adults in the workforce.

Yes it is, if we still needed 90+% of the population to work or people starved that’s a self correcting system. Less than that work and you have less people.

> if we still needed 90+% of the population to work or people starved

I actually didn’t say that. And the twisting of words is the source of confusing

You can argue about all the many secondary reasons for each of the different groups (retirees, prisoners, etc), but only one thing is required for every group.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com