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Comment by formulaT | Hacker News Reader

Care to expand on this? If you mean to imply that this means automating trucking would be a bad thing, I disagree.

According to mainstream economics, jobs are not an externality (although they are during a recession). The total amount of money to go around after an efficiency increasing change, will be greater. With taxation, this means that in theory everyone can be made better off. In practice, the truckers will be worse off, but you could at least arrange taxes so that the percentage of people earning less than X decreased, for all X.

Then the only argument left is that the change is somehow unfair to truckers. But that viewpoint unfairly privileges the status quo.

One thing that is true is that the adjustment period will be hard.

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And the adjustment period can be longer than a human lifetime … so those people are just screwed.

That’s no way to go about this. Obviously, not increasing efficiency would be bone-headed, but it is centrally important to create a socially acceptable transition for those (and any people) who are affected by this. That is currently not happening and hasn’t been happening in the past.

The luddites were right. The changes industrialization brought really did suck for them and for them it really didn’t get any better ever, until they died. From that point of view smashing the machines is entirely rational, even if those same machines created tremendous, unimaginable wealth. Obviously I’m not advocating smashing machines here, but, you know, we do have to find workable solutions for the luddites.

But we don't owe it to make sure that no one is ever worse off. There are people who never had jobs in the first place. If a trucker loses is job because of technological change, why is the trucker now entitled to more than the person who never had a job?

My own guiding principle here is that everyone deserves a life in dignity, unemployed or employed. You are of course completely correct that we also suck at insuring that for the unemployed.

I mean, I’m more than happy to consider solutions to this problem that tackle the problem of unemployment as a whole, not just this small part we just considered. I think finding a general solution would definitely be even better and thinking about this problem (e.g. basic income) definitely often tends to consider unemployment as a whole.

Existing welfare addresses the problems of unemployment. Not as well as welfare in other English speaking countries, but it still ameliorates the problem.

My position is that even with the current welfare system, technologies that increase productivity, but make some people unemployed, are still good from a utilitarian perspective. The trickle down effect (including through the existing welfare system), which benefits the entire poor population, makes up for the negative effect on the newly unemployed.

EDIT: as always, I have no problem with downvotes for my other opinions, but it's really sad to see downvotes for economic orthodoxy. If anyone reading this downvoted me, please educate yourself on mainstream economic thinking. You don't want to be remembered as an anti-vaccination advocate.

That is a big understatement. In the current world, you lose your job and you're on your own, save some meager, temporary unemployment. Society does not value the jobless and nor are we very good at enabling lost "worker threads" to retool and take on another, more valuable task. We generally treat those people as a lazy burden. Automation is a potentially unprecedented source of efficiency in many areas, but who will profit from these efficiencies? There will be economic impact from thousands of people losing their jobs, as well.

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