Daron Acemoglu: America is sleepwalking into an economic storm

The purpose of shortening the workweek by 25% is to "create" 20% more "jobs", which still presumes that "everyone" must "work"; but that presumption is false, and, like every falsehood, a sadistic trap.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39716331> (2024-3-15)

The steam engine made hash of the civilizational moral imperative to work for one's living. Suddenly, instead of N people's labor being needed to support N people, 0.1N or 0.2N people's labor could support N people. What was there for the others to do? So all -- exactly all -- of the political debates of the long 19th and 20th Centuries (where politics is taken to include war) were based on the pretense that the steam engine had no such consequence.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38409930> (2023-11-25)

If interested, there has been a lot of research done on the implications of the steam engine and other general-purpose technologies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_technology