Quote:
Originally Posted by GGG
Why is the next 40 years different from the previous 2000?
There was a time where the only job available was food gathering and hunting. But once agriculture made that obsolete tell me how there was enough jobs?
The efficiency gains currently being made are nothing compared to the industrial revolution and they didn’t run out of jobs then either.
In general “running out” of jobs means the cost of producing sufficient food and energy has decreased and as a result less labour is spent on this activity and more can be spent on luxury. That luxury can be spare time or it can be consuming other goods and services.
So don’t worry about it, it will take care of itself.
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The big potential difference I see with current times is the speed of change. Frictional unemployment is always around as opportunity in the labor market changes and people lose jobs, take time out to re-skill and then enter new jobs. With a much greater rate of change though, skills become obsolete more quickly and the skills needed to re-enter the workforce are more sophisticated than they used to be. The result may be that people just can't keep up with the rate of change anymore, and that people are out of the workforce trying to re-skill much more frequently than in the past or just end up giving up on keeping up with the chase.
Also, the large majority of industries are already well into becoming digitized. The way tech industries tend to work is winner-takes-most, and the number of employees for large companies in digitized industries is much lower than big companies of the past. It's the nature of digitized products and services that they can scale without requiring much human labor. So, our industries are all moving towards a model that we already see using less labor to achieve market dominance, and that doesn't bode well for employment.