> Mechanisation/Mechanization of farming basically put 99% of farm-workers out of a job.

Stats like this get thrown around a lot but it's worth considering that the ABSOLUTE numbers might not actually change that much over time.

With agriculture specifically, we can make some rough estimates that, before mechanization (say, 1760-1800 period), there was maybe 10^9 people on Earth and they were all employed in agriculture. So ~10^9 farm-workers.

As of 2024, FAO estimates of global agricultural workforce put the total at about 892 million; call it ~9x10^8. [1]

So, more precise (but perhaps not much more accurate) to say that mechanization put 10% of farm workers out of a job, not 99%.

Now, it certainly IS true that mechanization allows (or forces, depending on your perspective) 90% of the population of Earth to do something other than farming, which is the real point you were making - Technology DOES have a way of disrupting what we've been doing for generations.

[1] https://www.fao.org/statistics/highlights-archive/highlights...

Something doesn't add up --

> The agricultural sector employed 892 million people worldwide in 2022, which corresponds to 26.2 percent of total employment. However, in the USA:

> Direct on-farm employment accounted for about 2.6 million of these jobs, or 1.2 percent of U.S. employment.*[1].

The USA grows enough food to feed itself[2], so this indicates that either the rest of the world still hasn't mechanized farming (possibly due to poverty), or that crops in the rest of the world are particularly resistant to mechanization. If the rest of the world was at the same level of mechanization as the USA, the total number of people employed would be about 5% of what it you cited.

[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/58282 [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6041859/

Yah - people get fooled by the drop in the relative percentage of the population when the absolute numbers are not actually changing that much. What is real is that the structure of overall society does change - food production becomes less of a concern and people shift their focus to producing other things - but it's wrong to imagine that food production is less important. It just becomes relatively well optimized and less economically productive (i.e. lower ROI for capital). You still need the food just as much.