This is not a fallacy my dear sweet man (LS edit). It’s called empirical support. The fact that technological innovation has never lead to systemic structural unemployment, and in fact only increases real wages, supports our theory and directly contradicts yours. I understand that this can be quite inconvenient for someone that adheres to untenable and already refuted doctrines (labor and capital as competitive factors of production, rather than co-dependent factors of production), but that’s your problem and not ours. Also, familiarize yourself with the notion of scarcity.
Your primitive arguments were refuted 400 years ago. It’s time for you to educate yourself.
So the working prototypes will drive all over the country, replacing 15 million cars and trucks. No new cars will have to be made.
So before the Industrial Revolution one man made one needle in one day [say]. Afterwards, increased production by capitalists required an increased labor force, so that more than one man was needed to make one needle in one day. This made the capitalists richer.
So nobody in China is doing any work, except for a technocrat here and there.
**
Redistributed into a guarenteed national income, hey? The Google car will get us that? Every man woman and child in the USA will be on Social Security from the day they are born. This is economically feasible.
Of course, everyone getting a check every month will not raise prices either. Because that monthly check to 350 million people will come from real wealth, not printed money. The Google car will make enough profits to support everyone in the USA.
And all those silly rioters all over Europe are wasting their energy. In just a little while, Google cars and unlit factories, along with other technological breakthroughs, will provide all the money they need to keep getting their promised benefits. This is the 21st Century, my friend. Surely you can wait a few weeks until Google cars zoom down the road and you can sit home and collect your checks. The money is there, or will be any minute.
**
True.
Oh, so THAT’S what causes the morass of third-worldism. All those third world countries are filled with humming factories, employing the latest technology and thus requiring no labor. The capitalists there did that, after they came running to the third world, attracted by the ease of running a business there, the lack of corruption, the protection of property rights.
Nothing like being dead to make you wrong. And the longer you are dead, the wronger you are. Everything Euclid and Newton and all the other great minds wrote is just wrong. Those ideas decayed with time, along with the bodies of the men who discovered them.
In fact, the Nobel Prize committee should go around stripping the dead winners of their prizes. “You are wrong now, fool. Just look at you, dead as a doornail. Weren’t smart enough to outwit death, were you?”
“The fact that technological innovation has never lead to systemic structural unemployment, and in fact only increases real wages, supports our theory and directly contradicts yours”
My point about Rome is that for quite a long time, one could say "barbarian warlords have never led to the fall of Rome, so the theories that they could are discredited - but eventually of course they did. Because things change. That barbarian warlords could not conquer Rome in the 4th Century is not evidence that they couldn’t in the 5th - that certain economic systems didn’t break down in the 20th Century is not evidence they aren’t in the 21st.
If you watch the David Autor presentation, he’s trying to explain a phenomenon which he sees as already having happened - the disappearance of stable, middle-class jobs - it’s not a question of ‘will automation cause structural unemployment from stable, middle-class jobs’ but ‘where did the stable middle-class jobs go?’ So the evidence is already there I think, it’s just a matter of how it’s interpreted.
He’s also not painting a picture where everyone is unemployed - but a world where you’re either a high paid professional or capitalist, or a low paid dishwasher, with not very much opportunity in the middle.
I was being sarcastic, of course. If the implication is that technology “steals” jobs and creates unemployment, then it should follow that jobs could be created (back) by simply destroying (or outlawing) technology. Hence, all a genius central planner would need to do to create prosperity and zero unemployment would be to destroy (or outlaw) enough technological advances. In my example, if airplanes, engines, and wheels were outlawed, imagine how many jobs would be created as everyone starts using six-runner chairs for travel.
Seriously, stop posting the same stuff over and over again if you don’t bother having actual arguments. You get responses from people, and then you ignore them and let your own threads die. Why do you bother?
How is “wage polarization” in and of itself a problem? We know technology increases the marginal productivity of labor, so even the dishwasher will benefit from more advanced dishwashing equipment that allow him to wash dishes faster, hence be more productive and earn a higher real wage. Moreover, as a consumer, goods will be far more abundant because of the overall increased productivity from technological advancement, which drives prices downward, so even if his real income remains stable, the dishwasher will be able to purchase a greater amount of goods. Even if the fear is that some individuals will benefit more from the increased productivity yielded by technology than others, seemingly there would still be Pareto improvement for everyone as long as there are still human wants that need to be satisfied.
I’m guessing what will happen we will no longer need to each own a car, think of just paying a monthly fee or per mile fee for a car… The thing picks you up at your home after you contact it with your mobile phone, drops you off and goes and picks up someone else all automated… No parking, maintenance, or insurance to worry about and you can get work done in transit.
I’m looking forward to it
We wouldn’t need nearly as many cars and they would actually reach the economies of scale that I don’t think we realize in todays market, they could just be generic looking because everyone would ride in one or more likely they would have advertisements on them, for some reason I imagine they wouldn’t be like a standard car more like a small room pod type thing.
Also if petrol gets too expensive they could convert them economically and fuel them at their stations I feel it would be an easier transition to hydrogen or whatever
As they gradually produced enough we would eventually reach a state where we would end up spending much much less as a % of our income on transportation. and a lower % of the population would be needed to supply it.
I’m trying to figure out how you are conflating armed conflict with technological innovation… besides trying to warn us that we should never say never, that is?
And this line:
“He’s also not painting a picture where everyone is unemployed - but a world where you’re either a high paid professional or capitalist, or a low paid dishwasher, with not very much opportunity in the middle.”
… is this the beginning of some sort of Marxist class warfare argument? I think so. I see this as the opening salvo in such a statement, since the only ‘natural’ conclusion that can be drawn from it is that “low paid dishwasher[s]” won’t have access to all that technology.
Unlike David Autor, I would argue that even a lot of “high skill, high education” jobs are going to be cut from automation - think TurboTax shrinking the market for accountants, or online streaming lectures and discussion chat rooms making university class room ssizes potentially infinite.
I’m involved in the design/architecture field, and while computers can’t really design things, they can make it easier and quicker, and the internet makes it possible to easily outsource even architecture design - a firm in Singapore can design a building in Utah, email the blueprints in Google Sketchup (which is easy to learn in the first place and free to download), and then stay in touch with the client via Skype to make revisions. This is leading to a hyper-competitive global market with fewer firms and fewer employees cranking out more projects at a higher rate.
Of course the purpose of every invention is be more productive, which includes less man hours to make the same amount of product.
Dp you drive a car? Use anything at all with wheels? Do you realize how many jobs you are destroying by doing that? How many people would have jobs transporting you and your stuff from place to place on their backs? And don’t tell me riding a horse or using beasts of burden for any purpose, that destroys jobs for humans, too.
Now we are on the subject, you are being hypocritical using a computer. A quill pen and old fashioned ink would require much more labor to send out your message to us all. Cut off your phone and electricity while you are at it. You Job Destroyer, you.
“Unlike David Autor, I would argue that even a lot of “high skill, high education” jobs are going to be cut from automation - think TurboTax shrinking the market for accountants, or online streaming lectures and discussion chat rooms making university class room ssizes potentially infinite.”
So you would be against a national sales tax solely because it’s simplification of the tax code would put accountants out of work?
Not to derail the topic, but is google really releasing these cars for sale/rent to the masses in the near-future? Or is it only the technology that will be ready then and we’ll have to wait x number of years before it gets through the yellow tape?