<story><title>It’s Not China; It’s Efficiency That Is Killing Our Jobs</title><url>http://dyske.com/paper/945</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>timr</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&quot;while efficiency eliminates certain jobs, it just shifts employments to other sectors as long as people continue to innovate.&quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Oh yeah?  Prove it.  (Hint:  when you do, you should wait patiently for your Nobel, because you&apos;ll have earned it.  You&apos;re re-stating a very popular theory, but that popularity doesn&apos;t make the theory a fact.)&lt;p&gt;The problem that I have with the &quot;innovation&quot; canard is that it inherently assumes equality of potential for every worker in the labor force:  we don&apos;t have much room for unintelligent people in our society if you now have to &quot;innovate&quot; just to get a job.  Most people can&apos;t innovate, and never will.&lt;p&gt;Your argument about candle-makers is also a straw man:  thus far through our history, we&apos;ve been able to replace each declining low-skill industry with the ascendancy of another equally low-skill industry (argiculture to factory labor, factory labor to &quot;service&quot; work, etc.)  But that era appears to be coming to an end.  In a world where there are no jobs for people in the bottom X% of intelligence, we don&apos;t automatically get more innovation -- we just get structurally unemployed people.</text></item><item><author>littlegiantcap</author><text>I absolutely loathe these arguments.&lt;p&gt;The economy is not a zero sum game! When I gain a dollar another person doesn&apos;t inherently lose one. We build wealth, and while efficiency eliminates certain jobs, it just shifts employments to other sectors as long as people continue to innovate. For this argument to hold any sort of water we would still be fretting over what to do with all the unemployed candle makers after the advent of electricity. The answer isn&apos;t to move backwards, or as the author suggest to promote inefficiency, but to use our creativity to move forward. The world has plenty of problems that need fixing, and as long as there are problems with the world, and there always will be, and as long as we as a society and a planet continue to strive to make tomorrow better than the day before it, we will continue to innovate and create jobs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>forensic</author><text>The anti-luddite argument is actually an argument in favor of social darwinism.&lt;p&gt;When people say that the jobs will shift to other sectors, they are really saying that an elite few will control all the wealth and if you can&apos;t appeal to their self-interest you are expendable.&lt;p&gt;The elite few who control all the wealth right now are not even spending or investing their money. They are just sitting on it. Because they&apos;d rather have the money tomorrow than the services of the poor today. This is another way of saying that the current world&apos;s poor are expendable to the elite.&lt;p&gt;I don&apos;t see this mindset changing any time soon. All logic indicates that the world&apos;s poor are going to starve to death in their ghettos while the elite technologists sit on their money piles -- money piles defended by predator drones and LDAP.</text></comment>
<story><title>It’s Not China; It’s Efficiency That Is Killing Our Jobs</title><url>http://dyske.com/paper/945</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>timr</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&quot;while efficiency eliminates certain jobs, it just shifts employments to other sectors as long as people continue to innovate.&quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Oh yeah?  Prove it.  (Hint:  when you do, you should wait patiently for your Nobel, because you&apos;ll have earned it.  You&apos;re re-stating a very popular theory, but that popularity doesn&apos;t make the theory a fact.)&lt;p&gt;The problem that I have with the &quot;innovation&quot; canard is that it inherently assumes equality of potential for every worker in the labor force:  we don&apos;t have much room for unintelligent people in our society if you now have to &quot;innovate&quot; just to get a job.  Most people can&apos;t innovate, and never will.&lt;p&gt;Your argument about candle-makers is also a straw man:  thus far through our history, we&apos;ve been able to replace each declining low-skill industry with the ascendancy of another equally low-skill industry (argiculture to factory labor, factory labor to &quot;service&quot; work, etc.)  But that era appears to be coming to an end.  In a world where there are no jobs for people in the bottom X% of intelligence, we don&apos;t automatically get more innovation -- we just get structurally unemployed people.</text></item><item><author>littlegiantcap</author><text>I absolutely loathe these arguments.&lt;p&gt;The economy is not a zero sum game! When I gain a dollar another person doesn&apos;t inherently lose one. We build wealth, and while efficiency eliminates certain jobs, it just shifts employments to other sectors as long as people continue to innovate. For this argument to hold any sort of water we would still be fretting over what to do with all the unemployed candle makers after the advent of electricity. The answer isn&apos;t to move backwards, or as the author suggest to promote inefficiency, but to use our creativity to move forward. The world has plenty of problems that need fixing, and as long as there are problems with the world, and there always will be, and as long as we as a society and a planet continue to strive to make tomorrow better than the day before it, we will continue to innovate and create jobs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>littlegiantcap</author><text>I don&apos;t view my candle maker argument as a straw man rather than an example. I could provide more examples starting at the industrial revolution moving forward, and I assure you there are countless, which would by definition make it not a straw man argument because I&apos;m not misrepresenting anyone&apos;s position nor am I cherry picking 1 instance to prove my own argument.&lt;p&gt;As far as you&apos;re argument for unskilled labor, I have two things to say. 1. I think you are greatly overestimating and marginalizing people. Plenty, if not the majority of people have the ability to be innovators at least in some small way. 2. Even if your argument about unskilled labor does hold water, which I don&apos;t believe it does, you can break down a task into enough moving parts, or create a user experience in a way that people don&apos;t necessarily need to have genius levels of knowledge to be productive with the tools given to them. A perfect example is the military, where you take something like operating a jet aircraft and make it more accessible to people. There are countless of other examples in almost every field.&lt;p&gt;Finally, I can&apos;t prove it. I&apos;m not a professional economist, I don&apos;t have the background nor the data to provide any sort of coherent theory on the subject. What can I point to though is history, the history of innovation throughout time. Horses to cars, the transition to computers, the internet, there are so many things that have increased efficiency and people have shifted and adapted and continued to innovate and move forward and there continue to be jobs and task for people.</text></comment>