[VLM]

"But humanity has a remarkable capacity to invent new outlets to fill our waking hours as we redeploy resources used to make stuff to make other stuff or sell stuff."

Mere coincidence combined with survivorship bias. Ask the Easter Islanders or Mayans about how people always find new employment. By definition a developed economy is a country that was historically lucky, therefore its members hold very strange beliefs about cause and effect, like the collapse of employment in one industry magically results in employment in another industry because if it hadn't coincidentally happened, our ancestors economy would have collapsed and we'd be dead or owned by some other economy.

Bad car analogy is I've crossed many a street on foot, and I've never been hit, therefore there is a magic dead hand of social science that pushes cars out of my way, and I'll never get hit and nobody ever gets hit and its going to be eternally safe into the future. After all, if someone had run over my g-g-g-g-grandfather with an ox cart in the street, I wouldn't be here, therefore fatal car-pedestrian accidents don't happen.