Comment by skew-aberration | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skew-aberration | Hacker News Reader

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skew-aberration

Past changes to economic relationships haven't replaced labor either, yet they have led to conflict and starvation.

You are setting an incredibly high bar here, essentially a strawman.

If people feel disenfranchised due to their diminishing political and economic power, there will be enormous potential for conflict. This is a pattern across history and central to all the economics I've ever read. As an economist, do you not concede that economic changes induced by e.g. industrialization were pertinent to communism/fascism/WW2/cold war? That would be a remarkably unorthodox position. Do you not consider these events to be civilizational level dangers?

> I just don’t see any evidence yet that whole categories of jobs are being eliminated

There are more textile workers now than ever. They primarily live in poor conditions in impoverished countries, whereas they used to be highly skilled workers in the most prosperous countries who were even able to politically organize in their own interest.

Is the core of your argument that the industrial revolution and other such changes should have been aborted due to their downstream negative affects?

They also lead to great advancements in quality of life, and the capability of sustaining much more human life. We can't predict the long term outcome of new technologies, so the best we can do is blindly forge ahead and try to mitigate the obvious short term problems.

Yes, industrial revolution should have been managed differently and yes the world would be better if it was.

Easy to say "should".

It was possible, big interests simply didn't want to do it, see luddite history

> Past changes to economic relationships haven't replaced labor either, yet they have led to conflict and starvation.

Conflict sure, but mass starvation? What exactly are you thinking of?

We lived with 20-30% unemployment in various European countries until a few decades ago but I don't think mass starvation was an issue.

Starvation due to conflict due to changes in economic relationships, not due directly to unemployment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines

Almost every mass famine in the mid to late 20th century was caused by internal conflict. And almost every civil war is rooted in economic and societal organization. Great Chinese Famine, Soviet famine of 1932–1933, Russian famine of 1921–1922, Second Congo War, Nigerian Civil War, Soviet famine of 1946–1947, Khmer Rouge famines, 1983–1985 famine in Ethiopia, North Korean famine, Cuban famine, Spanish famine, Mozambican Civil War famine. List goes on. Famine due to military occupations during WW2, such as in Vietnam, Indonesia, Greece, Ukraine, Iran, etc.

The second biggest class of preventable famines would be those caused by the longer-term impoverishment and exploitation of the peasantry, leaving them vulnerable to natural events. This seems much less probable now, even as of the 20th century. It would cover Irish Potato famine and many of the climate induced famines under feudal or colonial rule.

In that second class, we might imagine that the famine could not have occurred if the populations had more economic (and military) power. Instead of being able to keep the scarce food required for subsistence of the local populations, food was exported to pay rent to foreign occupiers or to obtain necessities which cannot be produced locally due to laws set by the occupiers.

I suspect that the conditions the textile workers lived in when western countries were creating textiles is not so different in absolute terms from the condition that they live in now.

It's just that the western world moved on.

Almost all economies that have developed have started with textiles. This is the starting point on the ladder. Eventually, we will run out of poor countries that haven't had a textile industry yet, and at that point, either it will be entirely automated, or we will no longer have cheap textiles!

But I'm betting on the automation.

Textile manufacturing was dominated by Western countries until the 60s/70s btw. Berkshire Hathaway was a textile mill when Warren Buffet bought it.

Besides, if people are living in the same conditions today as the presumably Dickensian ones you were imagining, that alone suggests that the benefits of automation might not be widely distributed...

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