Historically your thesis has been frequently disputed, and the people disputing it have always been proven wrong. Population increases 10-fold? That doesn’t mean 90% unemployment, because now there are also 10 times as much demand for the products that new jobs can create. Automation puts 90% of farmers out of work? Fine, they’ll just eventually go back to work producing the products newly demanded by the remaining much-more-productive farmers and each other.
There do seem to be a couple limits on how far that process can go, though.
One is the Malthusian limit. Recast in economic terms, there is a finite amount of capital around, and as the population of labor increases past it, the price of the latter in terms of the former can be expected to drop below subsistence level. This keeps conspicuously not happening to humans, mostly because technology keeps improving the capital value of existing material goods, but it seems unwise to count on it not happening forever. This limit happens to other animal species all the time when their expansion into new territory hits its carrying capacity, and the results aren’t something we’d be happy with for humanity.
The other is the “robot world” limit. Although fears of “androids will take all our jobs” have mostly been replaced by “computers and industrial machines will work alongside us and make our jobs way more productive”, something more like the former could still happen eventually. This one has also already been observed happening to other species, surprisingly. Technologies like saddles, horseshoes, horse collars, carts, etc. made horses more and more productive, more and more popular… right up until the invention of the internal combustion engine, at which point most horses were no longer worth the cost of boarding them.
In either case, the safest job is “person with capital”. That either means enough economic capital to be self-sufficient via (possibly collective) production and trade without asymmetric employment, or enough political capital to convince the angry unemployed mob to give you a big share of the spoils when they fleece the people with economic capital. But now we’re veering into politics and I’ll stop.
There will be enough jobs. Whether or not you can live on the pay isn’t guaranteed. If there’s too many people, or even if the gap between the rich and poor is too large, the pay of the lowest jobs can fall below subsistence level.
This keeps conspicuously not happening to humans
The general version hasn’t. I think there has been times when the wage for untrained labor has fallen below subsistence.
The other is the “robot world” limit.
If robots do every kind of manual labor for us, there will still be jobs. The only limit is when they do the manual labor and the mental labor. It’s not the robot world limit. It’s the singularity.
That still very well might not get rid of jobs. It’s unlikely that people as we know them are the best at any job, but as long as you have them around, and they’re going to have those pretend MMORPG jobs anyway, it might be best to use some of them.
In either case, the safest job is “person with capital”.
Strictly speaking, that’s the only kind of job. Being good at something is considered human capital.
I’d agree that “person with monetary capital” will be a job that will last up until the end.
This isn’t really relevant, but it’s worth commenting on. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m arguing with you, but we seem to be in agreement.
The malthusian limit used to happen to people all the time. You can graph population against various supporting resources and watch it rise and fall in large regions historically. What is confusing the issue is that the industrial age has exploded productivity so much that we have not had a modern malthusian disaster. We came within a few inventions of having one in the 1960s or 1970s but the green revolution inventions aced that one out.
Current trends suggest the mid-term future of earth’s population is maxing at about 10 billion and then falling slowly. This will put off any malthusian disasters through the mid-term.
I HIGHLY recommend “The Rational Optimist” by Matt Ridley. Most amazing collection of useful points of view and information I have seen in a long time. Collapse by Jared Diamond is also a fun compendium of local malthusian disasters over the millenia.
Historically your thesis has been frequently disputed, and the people disputing it have always been proven wrong. Population increases 10-fold? That doesn’t mean 90% unemployment, because now there are also 10 times as much demand for the products that new jobs can create. Automation puts 90% of farmers out of work? Fine, they’ll just eventually go back to work producing the products newly demanded by the remaining much-more-productive farmers and each other.
There do seem to be a couple limits on how far that process can go, though.
One is the Malthusian limit. Recast in economic terms, there is a finite amount of capital around, and as the population of labor increases past it, the price of the latter in terms of the former can be expected to drop below subsistence level. This keeps conspicuously not happening to humans, mostly because technology keeps improving the capital value of existing material goods, but it seems unwise to count on it not happening forever. This limit happens to other animal species all the time when their expansion into new territory hits its carrying capacity, and the results aren’t something we’d be happy with for humanity.
The other is the “robot world” limit. Although fears of “androids will take all our jobs” have mostly been replaced by “computers and industrial machines will work alongside us and make our jobs way more productive”, something more like the former could still happen eventually. This one has also already been observed happening to other species, surprisingly. Technologies like saddles, horseshoes, horse collars, carts, etc. made horses more and more productive, more and more popular… right up until the invention of the internal combustion engine, at which point most horses were no longer worth the cost of boarding them.
In either case, the safest job is “person with capital”. That either means enough economic capital to be self-sufficient via (possibly collective) production and trade without asymmetric employment, or enough political capital to convince the angry unemployed mob to give you a big share of the spoils when they fleece the people with economic capital. But now we’re veering into politics and I’ll stop.
There will be enough jobs. Whether or not you can live on the pay isn’t guaranteed. If there’s too many people, or even if the gap between the rich and poor is too large, the pay of the lowest jobs can fall below subsistence level.
The general version hasn’t. I think there has been times when the wage for untrained labor has fallen below subsistence.
If robots do every kind of manual labor for us, there will still be jobs. The only limit is when they do the manual labor and the mental labor. It’s not the robot world limit. It’s the singularity.
That still very well might not get rid of jobs. It’s unlikely that people as we know them are the best at any job, but as long as you have them around, and they’re going to have those pretend MMORPG jobs anyway, it might be best to use some of them.
Strictly speaking, that’s the only kind of job. Being good at something is considered human capital.
I’d agree that “person with monetary capital” will be a job that will last up until the end.
This isn’t really relevant, but it’s worth commenting on. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m arguing with you, but we seem to be in agreement.
The malthusian limit used to happen to people all the time. You can graph population against various supporting resources and watch it rise and fall in large regions historically. What is confusing the issue is that the industrial age has exploded productivity so much that we have not had a modern malthusian disaster. We came within a few inventions of having one in the 1960s or 1970s but the green revolution inventions aced that one out.
Current trends suggest the mid-term future of earth’s population is maxing at about 10 billion and then falling slowly. This will put off any malthusian disasters through the mid-term.
I HIGHLY recommend “The Rational Optimist” by Matt Ridley. Most amazing collection of useful points of view and information I have seen in a long time. Collapse by Jared Diamond is also a fun compendium of local malthusian disasters over the millenia.