Big technology disruptions have happened before. The market adjusted and something new came along for people to do.
I like to argue: There were about one million working horses in the UK in 1900 but only 20k by 1914. No one found new jobs for those horses... [1]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_horse_in_Britain
That's because most of them were killed on the battlefields of WWI. Here's the source of that part of the Wikipedia article:
The war used horses in great numbers for non-cavalry
purposes. It is estimated that some six million horses
served and substantial numbers of these were killed. By
1914, the British had only 20,000 horses and the United
States was called upon to supply the allied forces with
remounts. In the four years of the war, the United States
exported nearly a million horses to Europe. This seriously
depleted the number of horses in America. When the
American Expeditionary Force entered the war, it took with
it an additional 182,000 horses. Of these, 60,000 were
killed and only a scant 200 were returned to the United
States.
I just read Storm of Steel -- which is, by the way, The Best First-hand Account of World War One -- and it does seem like you can't go two pages without running into a dead horse.
And from a numbers standpoint, if 6 million died in a 4-year war, it doesn't seem far-fetched that 980k would be killed in 6 months, especially since for an appreciable chunk of the war the Germans hunkered down behind the Siegfried line to conserve forces for a 2-front war.
Remember -- the war in 1914 was a war of movement. Which meant that men were charging across open fields to attack the enemy. The Germans wore leather helmets, the other armies wore cloth caps, and the French wore red trousers. Yet the armies had modern rifles and artillery. This was a deadly combination.
Battles in 1915-1918 racked up higher total casualties, largely because they lasted longer. The Battle of the Somme lasted four months -- because they kept fighting over the same piece of land. Whereas in early 1914, the armies were still fighting a war of movement, so they'd fight in ten different towns, and the casualties would be spread out over ten different battles.
The Christmas Truce was not a question of numbers -- for a lot of men had already been killed or wounded -- but attitudes. The soldiers still felt that their opponents were fighting honorably. Poison gas, the British starvation blockade of Germany, unrestricted submarine warfare -- that would all come later.
"Over the course of the war, Britain lost over 484,000 horses, one horse for every two men" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_in_World_War_I#Casualtie...
The service wave of disruptions moved manual labor to communications labor.
This wave of disruption is moving both of these to intellectual labor. Do I think that we have vast resources of unexploited intellectual labor? Yes. The issue is that the more people I meet the more I begin to believe the key to intellectual success is intellectual culture. Unfortunately, I don't think we have a very intellectual culture and culture changes slowly -- far slower than technology.
This route still works out to considerably cheaper than a traditional college education, takes less time than college, and has the potential for immediate employment once qualifications and prerequisites have been met. Last time I checked, every company wants to hire a "rock star" if they could only find one...
I hear a lot of people say this here, but that's not true for most jobs in the industry. For big companies good luck even getting past the HR without a degree.
Most of the people I know who do hiring, including some in Fortune 100 companies, very frequently identify through networking, not HR. Yeah, if the company hasn't heard of you until you hit the HR front door filtering process, your going to have trouble without a degree, but if you are coming in that way, you are already behind the curve.
Not everyone has the specific skills needed to do the job, either: to be maximally employable, those are both things that you would do well to develop (I'm much better at the skill side than the connections side myself, but that doesn't stop me from recognizing the fact that connections matter a lot.)
Yes, there was pressure to have a degree. But I knew several when I was there whose highest degree was high school.
The people who know the most and, moreover, learn the best, tend to be those who love to know and learn. It is that which is so rare in our society. The Tweet, the press release, the short pithy blog post; these are consumption disguised as learning. I come to HN to learn -- unfortunately even here I suspect that maybe a tenth of the articles teach me something.
/s
The attitude that everyone else is lazy and abusing the system seems most common in poor rural regions that depend the most on benefits. It usually has racial, anti-urban overtones that imply "we're only suffering because of THOSE people who don't look like us." It's a form of scapegoating.
The reasoning is usually along the lines of "oh he's just talking about those other people on benefits who don't deserve them. Not good hard-nonworking folks like us"
Poorer regions that more benefits do tend to vote for people to cut those benefits. But as Andrew Gelman has demonstrated, it's not really the people getting the benefits who want to cut them: it's the professional and ruling class in the area who do.
Nearly everywhere the lower classes do want more benefits, but the big difference between regions is what the powerful people want.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w17234
> Why do low-income individuals often oppose redistribution? We hypothesize that an aversion to being in "last place" undercuts support for redistribution, with low-income individuals punishing those slightly below themselves to keep someone "beneath" them. In laboratory experiments, we find support for "last-place aversion" in the contexts of risk aversion and redistributive preferences. Participants choose gambles with the potential to move them out of last place that they reject when randomly placed in other parts of the distribution. Similarly, in money- transfer games, those randomly placed in second-to-last place are the least likely to costlessly give money to the player one rank below. Last-place aversion predicts that those earning just above the minimum wage will be most likely to oppose minimum-wage increases as they would no longer have a lower-wage group beneath them, a prediction we confirm using survey data.
We need some serious educational reform . . .
Take a glance at the comments - apart from the usual anti-lawyer screeds, the other main theme is that it'll be way too expensive and they're not worth it. There are some impressively nasty opinions, and a regrettably large number of people who think that way.
There's no stigma involved in buying or using condoms or other means of avoiding pregnancy, although there is with abortion.
Here's a clearer example with humans instead of horses: 200 years ago, Shoemaking was one of the world's largest industries. Today, it represents a very small fraction of the world economy and almost all shoemakers have been replaced by machines.
What happened?
As shoemaking machines became commonplace, shoemakers were suddenly unable to compete. Some of them found other jobs, some of them became destitute. Most were probably able to keep shoemaking until they retired, as the shoemaking machines took a while to roll out.
However, the Shoemakers' children and other children in that generation were perfectly aware that shoemaking was no longer a viable industry. No one born after the popularization of shoemaking machines studied to become a shoemaker.
What is the result?
First, we now have less expensive, higher-quality shoes. This is not always an effect of mechanization, but it usually is. Second, we don't have mass unemployment.
Why do we not have mass unemployment? Because when you replace workers with less expensive machines, one of two things happen; either the factory owner makes more money, or shoes start to cost less. If the factory owner makes more money, they spend it on a yacht or something. If the shoes cost less, the consumers have more money to spend on food or books or whatever.
So, there are now very few people employed in the shoemaking industry, but all the shoemakers' children can now go into the expanding yacht-making or food-cooking or book-printing industries.
Recap: Mechanization does not cause long-term unemployment. At worst, it causes unemployment for a single generation of workers. Ultimately, decreasing costs in one industry contribute to the growth of other industries (either via increased profits for the wealthy or decreased costs for the non-wealthy), so there is not a significant net change in employment.
That means we won't have to worry about employment. It will be an outdated concept.
But in the mean time, we also have nothing worry about, for the reasons I mentioned.
The scenario I see is solar-powered space mining.
Most likely something like 10.
So I'm not really sure what you're getting at. Are you complaining that we get to work so little and have so much?
But we have kind of hit a tipping point though. Both in technology getting more efficient at automating even difficult work. As well as economic growth at least domestically is no longer as strong as it has been in the past.
The primary means of generating wealth has shifted to controlling capital from adding value, and that's not a good thing either. Those horses died off, we can't count on people to do the same.
Humans can do so many, many things that if one is undervalued, they will look at others.
Some maybe we should stop saying that we are factory workers and must stay factory workers -- it just doesn't work that way, and truly never has.
Surely someone could find new uses for old horses, after all they are organic and adaptable in a way that machines aren't.
And somebody did find new jobs for those horses! 2% of them, at least. The balance got slaughtered.
You can wave your hands and argue that the jobs are out there or will appear given sufficient creativity, but the market simply doesn't care about the faith you have placed in it. Your optimism doesn't control the unemployment level. We have to prepare for the eventuality that the jobs don't materialize, and we have to do it in a way that doesn't heap perverse incentives onto the unemployed while choking off the very consumption that fuels the economy in the first place.
I do not think this was as much of a slaughterhouse as that makes it look. Today, horses typically live for 20-30 years or so. In 1900, I would think working horses would be lucky to reach 20 years; as they became older and less productive, they would be sold of and slaughtered.
With an average 'working career' of 10-15 years or a horse, just stopping buying replacement horses would be enough for most of that decline in the number of working horses.
As a country and society we will of course find new things to do, hopefully even replacing our manufacturing loss with even better technologies and methods. However, we will always have a huge discontinuity produced by globalization and automation that abandoned a significant portion of the population without the skills or the hope to catch on to the new fields.
I'm trying to figure out where I got it from--do you happen to know its provenance?