| ▲ | blackoil 7 hours ago | |
> You can make humans more productive If productivity is 10x unless work increases 10x jobs will be gone. | ||
| ▲ | kudokatz 6 hours ago | parent [-] | |
In about 1930, Keynes wrote "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" [1] wherein he wrote: "I believe that this is a wildly mistaken interpretation of what is happening to us. We are suffering, not from the rheumatics of old age, but from the growing-pains of over-rapid changes, from the painfulness of readjustment between one economic period and another. The increase of technical efficiency has been taking place faster than we can deal with the problem of labour absorption; the improvement in the standard of life has been a little too quick ... We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come--namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour." While there's no guarantee that what Smith got wrong then is the same as now, it can be a reasonable outcome that "the jobs" won't just disappear. ---- Keynes also speculated on what to do with newfound time as a result of investment returns on the back of productivity [1]: "Let us, for the sake of argument, suppose that a hundred years hence we are all of us, on the average, eight times better off in the economic sense than we are to-day. Assuredly there need be nothing here to surprise us ... Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem-how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well." The modern FIRE movement shows that living at a dated "standard of living" for 10-15 years can free one from work forever. Yet that's not what most people do today. I would suggest that there are deeper aspects of human drive, psychology, and varying concepts of "morality" that are actually bigger factors in what happens to "jobs". | ||