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by VincentEvans 3177 days ago
If you think that models that are used to think about economy in aggregate somehow act as a guarantee that a life of an individual will not be wrecked as a result of large-scale automation.... well, lets discuss "lump of labor fallacy" when a former truck driver is "replacing" his job with 3 gig-economy part time jobs that sprung out as result of the "expanding economy".

It's not that those models are wrong, it's that it's a very different thing to read about 20 years of traumatic events from the pages of books on economics, vs. having to live through it.
2 comments
VincentEvans 3177 days ago
To add to this, a bit: Our present political kerfuffle is no small way caused by collective feeling of anger by population who have seen their (industrial, mining, farming) jobs in rural america disappear due to globalization, while the market expanded .... elsewhere. In New York, in San Fran, in China, in India. And the money from that expansion did not go anywhere near those affected.

But the upside is how much lives of Chinese have improved, so they got that going for them, which is nice.

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s73ver_ 3177 days ago
Kind of. Middle Class Chinese have had their lives improved quite a bit. Worker class Chinese, well, that situation seems fuzzier.
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pizza234 3176 days ago
This may be more or less true, but that's a separate problem from globalization. Due to globalization China got much much richer (to the point of politically bullying other countries due to economical power), but the distribution of the income is an internal problem.
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pizza234 3176 days ago
I agree with that.

My critic is towards stating that automation (robots, ai, etc.) causes a loss of jobs in absolute terms, as if in the future most of the people will be unemployed.

There's a radical difference between stating that changes (loss and creation at the same time) in the jobs market will cause disruption, and stating that jobs will be lost and that's it.

Thinking the (r)evolution in nihilistic terms will distract from improving the problems typically caused by the market change (which is the one you mentioned).

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