Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Retric 30 days ago
> Banks employ more people after introducing ATM's than before.

Not as a percentage of the population. In 1967 the US population in 1967 was 200 million today it’s 350 million. Globally the growth was even faster.

Your farming productivity numbers are also very exaggerated. The actual percentage of the population was very high because of food spillage, and inconsistent productivity due to weather etc. They often needed ~90% of the adult population to be farmers or people starved, and famine was still common. Right before industrialization that number started to drop which is largely what caused industrialization. You got a positive feedback loop of increased productivity when a vastly larger percentage of the population could do something other than produce food.
1 comments
protocolture 30 days ago
>Not as a percentage of the population. In 1967 the US population in 1967 was 200 million today it’s 350 million. Globally the growth was even faster.

Didnt I address that explicitly?

link
Retric 30 days ago
Not in your post, if you did you could quote an actual rebuttal that larger populations don’t inherently need more food, increase the need for banking services, etc etc.

You also found it odd I didn’t “remove non participants” but preindustrial societies didn’t necessarily have formal jobs for people. You’ll note I didn’t exclude modern stay at home parents as non workers because labor is the metric not if you have formal employment.

link
protocolture 29 days ago
>Ignoring for a second that net jobs and employment rates aren't really the same thing.

Net Jobs can increase while their percentage of all jobs drops. These things aren't necessarily linked or related. There isnt really a built in expectation that banking for 10 million people needs 10 times less staff than banking for 100 million people.

link
Retric 29 days ago
Demand scales with population, if the average person talks to a bank teller for 10 minutes a month having 10x the number of people doesn’t lower that number.

If automation doesn’t cost jobs, then growing the population shouldn’t change the overall employment rate meaningfully.

link