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Comment by ptaipale | Hacker News Reader

This sounds a bit of a Luddite approach to me. Yeah, all those spinning Jennies make weavers unemployed.

Right, but if you blame the proximal cause of unemployment then you don't have to address the underlying social issues or ask hard questions about the legitimacy of a system that snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.

Good point. Spinning Jennies and Uber taxis work as scapegoats; often the mental change is the hardest.

What mental change? To accept boring non-innovations as something fundamental?

No, to accept the possibility that we will need to institute economic policy that decreases the supply of unskilled labor without punishing the unskilled laborers for working below capacity.

We've done it before and we'll do it again, but in a society that (correctly) sees hard work as a personal virtue and is controlled by people with a vested interest in conflating the personal virtue with the societal virtue of promoting hard work, there's a fight every time the policies need tweaking.

The spinning machines were an actual technological improvement, whereas Uber (and many other valley companies) are just replacing old middlemen with new ones.

The mechanism of ordering and accepting a ride via a mobile application, as well as giving feedback both ways, is a new innovation (and the established taxi services seem very reluctant to adopt this kind of innovations.)

And the mechanism of putting items in a shopping cart is patented.

Yes, though that patent turned out to be indefensible about a year ago.

If that's the analogy you're going to use, it's probably worth remembering that the new jobs mechanisation created in the industrial revolution were in horrible conditions where the people using the new technologies died young after being worked to death putting in long hours for minimal wages.

Were the old jobs better? Hardly. The very reason that people came to work in these horrible conditions for minimal wages was that what they did before was even more horrible.

Not really. The impact of mechanisation was very bad to start with. Life expectancy fell to just 25 years during the first decade of the industrial revolution. When factory owners realised their workers were literally dropping dead on the factory floor they hurried to do something about it and conditions improved pretty quickly, but it's certainly the case that the industrialisation necessitated changes that hadn't been considered necessary before.

Life obviously wasn't brilliant prior to the spinning jenny, but it was definitely better than the 20 years that followed its proliferation. If Uber is really a parallel then the workers who drive for them are in for a couple of decades of having a pretty rubbish time.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/09/economic...

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