A couple hundred years ago, something like 70% of the population worked in agriculture. Technology replaced almost all of these jobs.
So far, we have reimagined old professions and created brand new ones. Is this ability of ours limitless?
A couple hundred years ago, something like 70% of the population worked in agriculture. Technology replaced almost all of these jobs.
So far, we have reimagined old professions and created brand new ones. Is this ability of ours limitless?
Yes, we can probably invent new jobs and new career fields.
No, it does fuck all for people who lose their current jobs mid-way through their career or later, and watch themselves and their families be kicked down 2-3 rungs on the socioeconomic ladder, possibly throwing them into generational poverty.
Or, in short: yes, there will be new jobs. But not for you, and not for your children.
For the society and human civilizations, these techological revolutions were always a net positive down the line. For individuals caught in them, they rarely were.
That's why the Luddites were destroying looms. Not to fight the progress of technology, but to save their own families from being thrown into poverty.
What did you think "disruption" meant? Vibes, papers, new Javascript frameworks?
Or their rural economy collapsed, everyone was hungry and unemployed, and they moved somewhere new out of necessity and basically started over with nothing, living in squalid conditions and working very unsafe, unpleasant, and exploitative jobs.
Jobs are a mean to make people consumers, not the only mean, but a significant one.
The ability to create more economic activity require both sides to catch up, so we will find a way to do so.
I imagine this is gonna continue to be true, except that "everyone wants consumers, nobody wants to employ people".
This is exactly why everything like Disney has moved upmarket, with pricing rising far above inflation.
It is also shocking how little my life compares to the rich people I see. I don't own two houses or a yacht. We don't take yearly vacations to a chateau in France. The gap between the top 10% and the top 1% is insane. The gap between the 1% and the 0.1% is even larger still.
But hey... not like the rich getting richer and saying "screw you" to everyone else has ever led to negative consequences right? Nothing to see here, business as usual.
Crassus amasses so much wealth because Caesar helped him.
And Crassus was the rich man who was monopolizing all of Rome with his slave firefighters + real estate scheme. When the going got tough, they seekwd power from the rich guy, no one was stopping Crassus.
Also the logic of what Broadcom/Avago did with VMware: only chase the whales.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-ameri...
True... but not really relevant here.
Wealth inequality is a global problem.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/24/un-global-ineq...
Yeah, and not just individual destinations but entire destination cities.
See, for example, the radical reshaping of Las Vegas.
The number of millionaires/billionaires/etc feels low enough that there won't be demand for dozens of companies in every possible industry. The ones that have the biggest fanbase/cultural footprint maybe stick around, but the majority would presumably just go under.
First, why does it feel wrong?
1. the top 10% get about 50% of pre-tax income
2. they get 30 to 37% of disposable income after tax&transfers (depending on source)
3. and we know the rich have a higher savings rate, so consume a lesser share of their income (US, China)
May be not top 10% but top 0.1% are good at avoiding tax using various loopholes. Like borrowing against stocks (and other appreciating assets) till death to avoid paying CGT and debt is then repaid by heirs which do not pay CGT AFAIK. So they can spend more than income stats would suggest.
Is it not conceivable that we won't find a way to do so, and that consumption and economic activity will ultimately decline?
What I always come back to is this: Why does it matter what the very richest do? Worst case the economy operates approximately as it does now (maybe with us knowledge workers knocked down a few rungs). But like, the rich can't eat _all_ the food.
I feel like the most likely outcome is that the quality of life of the bottom 90% is overall better than today. HN'ers quality of life is maybe worse than it is today.
Where do you live? The rich will own all housing.
Presumably if we're all unemployed or employed in jobs that have zero economic worth to them, they'll buy all of our houses, build a bunch of big grey boxes for us to live in like a human zoo, build even bigger and more tasteless McMansions for themselves, and pass legislation that makes it illegal to live near them or inconvenience them.
The quality of life for the bottom 90% of the world has been getting better because they were so desperately poor that they could rely on economic growth to help them. At some point they're going to be rich enough in commodities that they start looking to buy things like houses or start businesses, at which point they'll find that asset prices are rising faster than their own wealth because of growing inequality, and they will look at their big grey boxes full of shoebox apartments and start to become unhappy too.
- capital / limited goods
- allocation of labor
Things like land are a limited commodity. Concentration of ownership usually comes with rent extraction. Because you need to live somewhere, but available locations are finite (and supply can even be controlled, and is). This means that you can end up with a cartel scenario where increasingly normal peoples previously disposable income is tied up in an increasingly large % to those fixed costs of living. This is arguably well under way in some countries.
The second point is, the richest enjoy goods like personal yachts, private planes, luxury restaurants. If a lot of labor is increasingly allocated to producing highly inefficient luxuries, it's essentially wasted. You might have hundreds of businesses employing thousands of people or machines, but the productivity of their work is essentially all going into products consumed by a few people. I'd say a limited amount of this is a good thing, it's a normal part of the proliferation of choice enabled by capitalism. But taken too far you return to a historic economy where most peoples productive life is spent serving a tiny elite, while living in poor conditions themselves.
In our financial system, your income as an individual has to be significant enough to send a signal to produce the goods you want. If this ceases to be true for even a significant minority of people, you will find consumer choices and available quality decreasing for those people, which is a real problem. This is to a lesser extent happening in some segments of the economy.
This is also largely the conclusion of classical economics (i.e. Adam Smith) and the argument was developed in great detail by Riccardo, George (who explicitly considered the no-labor-required case in 1800s), and many others.
This is history, not a random hypothesis. Feudal serfs had the ways and means to bootstrap, but in fact lived worse than their pre-feudal ancestors.
I actually have a random thought that it is this innate human drive that causes society to be mostly employed despite massive differences in technology and productivity across geography and time.
What if the driver of employment is not efficient return of capital, but satisfaction of human mind?
The human system relies on us doing stuff for each other, mediated by "money". We get "paid" by some other human for doing stuff for them. "Stealing" is discouraged. "Being given" is rare. "Money" originates from fiat, goes where it goes.
Humans unable to do for others don't get "paid", get starved/sick etc, experience pain, cause trouble and disappear eventually. When doing stuff for people is not done by people, the pay cycle breaks. When machines do a substantial fraction of economic activity (intangibles like decision-making, writing, answering the phone, etc. as well as transport), there is no need for very many people. Absent the need, there will be no support. The farms won't give their food away, they will arm themselves against the hungry.
There will be some human work. So long as machines cannot equal human touch and experience combined, there will be medicine. There will always be sex work. But who affords it?
Possibly racial disparities will diminish. A machine might actually give equal medical care to, or equally arrest, the Black and white person. Or not, depends on the training. Look who's developing the AIs.
Economists thought that economic development means democratic development. They were wrong, see China. They thought that economic liberalization means good governance. Wrong, see Russia. Economists are right about things until they are wrong, and we can all run off the cliff with them.
When the population drops (war, starvation, refusal to bear children) to the level needed to run the machines, the system will stabilize. Pretty much the horse scenario.
But what's consistent with those events is that they end and economic development is resumed under different circumstances. I don't see any reason that the current era will be different or that current problem will be unfixable. People used to get paid to build national parks. What would be our current iteration of national parks?
There are plenty of poeple who have inadequate work the world over because there isn't enough paid work to do, and most professions are servicing wants, not needs, so the demand is very elastic, with many people now multi talented and still not making ends meet.
2. Economics is a function of human behavior, not horse behavior. Economics is about coordinating human effort. Humans make economics, horses don’t. When economics change in a way that is bad for horses, the horses have no recourse. When economics change in a way that is bad for humans, the affected humans seek to change things.
Humans are not required in economics. Only inputs and outputs. That's it. It is a grand delusion we have that we meatsacks are needed.
Civics and society seem to still need people and that's what I'm worried about breaking down.
Assuming we are around for this, this raises the question: if the economy can function without us, what claim will we have on its outputs?
They were tools that people used to get things done.
They got replaced by better tools. Just like typewriters got replaced by computers and printers.
This is exactly the perspective many executives have of their employees.
To spell it out: When horses are no longer needed for a task, they are sold or sent to slaughter.
I hope I don't have to explain how differently you and I are treated when we lose a job?
People need jobs in order to pay for food, shelter, and healthcare.
Many executives feel zero moral obligation to provides jobs to people and instead treat that as a necessary evil that gets in the way of profit. As soon as that evil becomes unnecessary, they will happily lay off as many people as they can.
In aggregate, when enough executives do that, then people will not be able to find jobs.
When they can't find jobs, they are unable to pay for food, shelter, and healthcare.
Even if the board cares, they are pressured by the investors.
Even if the investors care, they are pressured by the pension fund administrators.
Even if the pension fund administrators care, that far removed, they care about their pensioners more.
Similarly, hardly anyone takes a job out of moral obligation to the employer. They need money, and accepts the best job they can get.
We've been doing this for many centuries now, and empirically it has been wildly successful for pretty much everyone involved.
In aggregate, yes. But if you zoom in on the trajectory, you can see that it's peppered with wars and revolutions.
Also famines and diseases we can now easily cure wiping out entire societies.
I'm glad we had this talk :)
Also, those past few centuries have involved the largest violent revolutions and wars in human history.
The idea of employment and money is a relatively modern conception. There is no physical law that states it must work indefinitely and efficiently for all participants.
> I hope I don't have to explain how differently you and I are treated when we lose a job?
About the same once you run out of money. At least here in the US, ymmv in countries that have sane social safety net policy.
https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/06/justices-uphold-laws-targ...
There's a phrase for it in fact, "Human Resources".
Though that sounds more like natural resources, like trees for a lumber company or paper mill.