Comment by kranke155 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kranke155 | Hacker News Reader

As any now typical text of this nature, it cites very little real data.

Here is an article on how recent historians believe that English male height during the Industrial Revolution went down due to malnutrition:

https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2013/09/13/did-livin...

Historians now think the Industrial Revolution was a giant economic boom where the majority of individuals actually became poorer.

Here is an Indiana University paper, consistent with the findings of others, that automation did reduce manufacturing jobs

> The basic takeaway from the Ball State work is that both forces—offshoring and automation—are in play in the massive occupational realignment due to hit the U.S. economy, but automation is dominant (Wells, 2017). This assessment, that automation is the greater threat, is consistent with their earlier work placing the loss of manufacturing employment on increases in productivity

https://www.ibrc.indiana.edu/ibr/2018/fall/article2.html

This was all around the Trump years when the media and academia were happy to say “China didn’t do it”. Even the NYtimes said it at the time.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/21/upshot/the-long-term-jobs...

Yes we can find jobs for people if we keep trying. But the jobs that we find in a post-scarcity services society are often precarious and meaningless - and people know it. Agriculture and manufacturing, which are the two job categories that really matter, do lose jobs to automation because we are squeezing them for profits all the time through all available methods.

To say that everything will be hunky dory with AI is just the same as saying the steam engine won’t take your job. That was BS in the 1800s and it’s BS now. And yes people did lose their way of life and they did become poorer, as demonstrated by the current studies on the matter.

As I said, sometimes the job goes different people in different places, and there’s always frictional pain in the adjustment On the other hand, you are correct that I didn’t post data saying that unemployment hasn’t fallen, but then that is self-evident. We do not have 50% unemployment now because machines took half the jobs, and we are all of us vastly more prosperous than we were in 1800 or 1900 - again, I don’t think I need to post a chart to the obvious.

"there's always frictional pain" is a fairly big understatement.

I think the assumption underlying this is that somehow stable on the other end, but I don't necessarily see post-industrial service oriented societies as stable economic realities. Having lived in one(UK), I found it as close to a capitalist dystopia as one can get.

William Gibson described 'capitalist dystopia'. The UK has a very strong, active and centralised state - indeed much more so than the USA. It presumes that healthcare is free, that everyone has access to education, that everyone is entitled to a social security safety net, and a whole bunch more besides.

Have you ever lived there?

Children are ranked by intelligence at a very young age, making it so underprivileged kids are told “you’re not going to make it” at a young age and relegated to a “lower” class. London street drug sales are thus dominated by disillusioned teenagers. Entire cities lost their way of life when Thatcher ended their industries and became dead ends where heavy drug addiction is quite rampant. The population is parted into two (as is common in “post-industrial” societies) the folks who take the now exorbitant loans for education and “make it”, and those that don’t and get relegated to receiving a living wage for the rest of their lives. There is an almost palpable feeling of haves and have-nots, around housing and increasingly everything else.

Yes there is some social contract in place but the post-industrial society is not a gentle one that I’ve witnessed. I’ve seen 2/3 (south of Brazil, north of Portugal and industrial England/Scotland). They don’t really compare well to successful industrial countries like Germany.

Vaclav Smil said “with no manufacturing there is no middle class”.

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