[thafman]

Remember travel agents? Remember how they just kind of vanished one day?

Horseshit, I make a very comfortable, middle class living at an online/mobile travel commerce start-up that does booking transactions in much the same way that a travel agent used to. The travel agent job disappeared, but Expedia, Tarvelocity and Orbitz -to name just the big, public facing brands of this transition- employ tens of thousands of middle class people.

[roel_v]

Way to miss the point. His whole argument is that computers and internet-enabled self-service have taken over the majority of the menial labor that travel agents used to do. A travel agent, in case you've never seen one, is someone working in a retail-location shop, behind a counter where they help people plan trips by showing them glossy brochures of hotels, finding the cheapest fares for people, or assemble packages of hotel stays, flights and restaurant visits. Pretty much all of which has been taken over by computers, replacing hundreds of thousands of jobs with tens of thousands of jobs, a large number of which in high-tech with (relatively) high wages. Lots of manual labor by people who aren't very capable are replaced with a few highly capable (or at least highly specialized) people. That's his point, and it's happening in the travel industry, in mail distribution, in manufacturing - everywhere.

(to be clear, I'm all in favor of this - it's progress. It's going to suck being of median intelligence in 20 years though; relatively, someone of median intelligence is going to be worse off as compared to 50 years ago. Of course in absolute terms they're going to have a major advantage, so I don't feel bad for anyone.)

[charleso]

Aren't you significantly more efficient than the travel agents of the 80s?

So, your single-person living has removed the need for 10 or 20 (or 50?) travel agency folks of a previous non-Internet 'must visit that travel agent around the corner to get my trivial purchase Thanksgiving tickets' world.

[robryan]

Which represents progress, are you really missing out on anything using the internet and being shown all the best deals available and all the information a travel agent would have provided.

Employment for the sake of employment isn't the answer, all throughout history people have done things in the most efficient ways available to then, just for most of history this involved a sizable labor force.

[yummyfajitas]

I don't think he was referring to "middle class" in the same sense you are. You are using "middle class" to describe a certain standard of living. The author is saying that we will all achieve this standard of living and it will no longer be a status marker.

You can already see this occurring. Having a cell phone, for example, is not a status marker anymore - everyone who wants one has one. Status is now about having the most pictures/friends/farms on facebook.

[SHOwnsYou]

There is nothing inherently bad about a lack of status symbols, if you even consider a cell phone a status symbol. You can get a cell phone for free on a $20/month contract.

Meanwhile, luxury items stay out of reach for most people, even if they want them (designer anything, expensive cars, mansion sized houses, etc).

I digressed, but there is no danger to cell phones or any new tech for that matter, being universally available.

[yummyfajitas]

The point is that cell phones used to be a luxury item - if you recall the movie "Wall Street", they were an example of conspicuous consumption by Gordon Gekko. In the sequel (according to the trailer), the the old cell phone is comic relief.

Apart from goods with an artificially high price and limited supply (designer goods), and possibly goods which cannot be manufactured (land), the author is predicting that luxury items of today will be commodities of tomorrow.

I agree with you - this is an extremely good thing.

[noodle]

travel agents still exist, they're just fewer and doing slightly different things.