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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
It's only in the last 150 years where economists' views conveniently start dovetailing with those of industrialists,
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Yikes. You're citing the state of knowledge of 150 years ago as superior to today's? After 150 years of the most rapid technological change in human history? Okay.
And you continue to argue against a straw man. I'm not claiming that technology instantly makes new jobs. I'm saying that your view - that technology has rendered large groups of people useless - is wrong. This is primarily because people find things to do rather than remain idle.
Which is why the problem is stagnant or declining wages - because some of those things aren't a valuable as what people were doing - rather than mass unemployment.
Quote:
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The theory that severely disruptive technology leads to more jobs should be modified to "Disruptive technological revolutions eventually- after a long period of time during which new jobs develop as a result of them - appear to create more jobs than they initially displace. Most of the initially displaced, however, do not receive these new jobs. In many cases, economies only eclipse initial jobs lost with new jobs gained decades, or perhaps a generation, after the introduction of the disruptive technology." That describes the phenomenon in total, as it should be explained.
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Again, you're talking about technological change as if it happens in a single point in time, and only occasionally. If those thing were true, you'd have a point. But they aren't. New technology isn't adopted instantly and disruptive ones are being invented all the time.
Frankly a better argument for your worldview would be that past technological changes are poor guidance because they happened in a world where labor was a scarce input and thus could be redeployed to other productive use. Maybe today is different, because we've reached a technological threshold at which there are no other productive uses for labor. In other words, this time is different.
I don't happen to think that, but it would at least be a coherent point.
