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>come with all manner of social unrest, revolutions, war and changes to the basic fabric of daily life. No need to be a Pollyanna. Unemployment rallies didn't

>come with all manner of social unrest, revolutions, war and changes to the basic fabric of daily life. No need to be a Pollyanna. Unemployment rallies didn't lead to war, they were just unpleasant. http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/081024-great-depression-photogallery-photogallery.html http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/081024-great-depressi... Economies are constantly changing and retraining and job migration are our norm, not our exception. Regardless of the current political climate, the reality is that you're not entitled to keep a job in some dying industry. Change has always been here, as much as we try to deny it. Hence the admission that we can't keep this train running and things like UBI are becoming politically feasible.

kasey_junk 9y ago
The thing people are worried about is not a particular industry dying or a market change like the Great Depression (though there are people that argue that the Great Depression, especially in a global context, was a major contributor to WWII) that corrects back into a similar economy. They are worried about a systematic removal of jobs at a massive rate, across the spectrum. So for instance, if you look at agriculture workers in the US it took from 1910 to ~ 2000 to get from 30% of the economy employed in farm work to ~2% (which is likely the minimum). Along the way you saw the massive labor unrest, cities had to be completely re-engineered, civil rights and family restructuring, 2 World Wars, etc. It is a reasonable fear that something like driver-less cars, which could impact a similar number of employees, could have just as big an impact, in a shorter time frame and that might not be all for the good. Its also possible that it was other factors that led to all that turmoil, or that we are better at societal change now, or that there is some new technology around the bend that gets unleashed due to this that prevents similar problems this time around. All of those are reasonable reasons to be optimistic (Pollyanna-ish if you will), but they don't cancel out the reasonable reasons to be pessimistic.
mcguire 9y ago
The Great Depression also played a part in the rise of nazism and fascism, and the abject terror of communism on the part of the rest of the world. And the rise of socialism in many of them. And the Great Depression wasn't an industrialization-related economic shift; it was more of a hiccup following the tectonic shifts in the nineteenth century part of the industrial revolution.
- drzaiusapelord 9y ago
  >And the Great Depression wasn't an industrialization-related economic shift; Again, that's not my point. It was large amounts of unemployment up to 50% in urban areas. If the GP is correct it should have led to a civil war, but it didn't.
  - eli_gottlieb 9y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
pavel_lishin 9y ago
> Unemployment rallies didn't lead to war, they were just unpleasant. Yeah, that's why we call it "The Great Unpleasantness", and not something like "The Great Depression".
- drzaiusapelord 9y ago
  Did it result in civil war or WWIII? That's my point. A lot of people on HN see what's happening and assume it'll lead to WWIII. It won't and its silly to think so. It'll continue the "rust belting" of America, where areas that can't compete, won't, and will be dependent on aid from the government. Again, this has been going on for a long time. Just because Millenials have only noticed this recently doesn't change a thing. This is also why some think some kind of UBI is going to be in the works in the near future. Society can handle x amount of permanently impoverished areas, but when does x become too large? The whole point of things like job tax credits, welfare, unemployment, re-training, local investment, etc is to keep people from civil unrest. UBI is just those things without the pretense that you'll ever get a job. Truck drivers in their 50s who never went to college aren't going to become competitive software developers no matter how much "training" you throw at them.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Didn't it? I mean, the equivalent of Great Depression across the pond was one of the primary (if not the primary) things that let Hitler rise to power in Germany and eventually to start WWII.
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    Something doesn't have to result in global thermonuclear war to be considered bad, and for us to want to avoid it. I don't want my kid to grow up in another depression. And there's been all sort of arguments (that I'm not qualified to evaluate) that the US Civil War was a direct result of economic conflict, due to the North being a much more economically productive region than the South.

kasey_junk 9y ago

The thing people are worried about is not a particular industry dying or a market change like the Great Depression (though there are people that argue that the Great Depression, especially in a global context, was a major contributor to WWII) that corrects back into a similar economy. They are worried about a systematic removal of jobs at a massive rate, across the spectrum. So for instance, if you look at agriculture workers in the US it took from 1910 to ~ 2000 to get from 30% of the economy employed in farm work to ~2% (which is likely the minimum). Along the way you saw the massive labor unrest, cities had to be completely re-engineered, civil rights and family restructuring, 2 World Wars, etc. It is a reasonable fear that something like driver-less cars, which could impact a similar number of employees, could have just as big an impact, in a shorter time frame and that might not be all for the good. Its also possible that it was other factors that led to all that turmoil, or that we are better at societal change now, or that there is some new technology around the bend that gets unleashed due to this that prevents similar problems this time around. All of those are reasonable reasons to be optimistic (Pollyanna-ish if you will), but they don't cancel out the reasonable reasons to be pessimistic.

mcguire 9y ago

The Great Depression also played a part in the rise of nazism and fascism, and the abject terror of communism on the part of the rest of the world. And the rise of socialism in many of them. And the Great Depression wasn't an industrialization-related economic shift; it was more of a hiccup following the tectonic shifts in the nineteenth century part of the industrial revolution.

drzaiusapelord 9y ago
>And the Great Depression wasn't an industrialization-related economic shift; Again, that's not my point. It was large amounts of unemployment up to 50% in urban areas. If the GP is correct it should have led to a civil war, but it didn't.
- eli_gottlieb 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

pavel_lishin 9y ago

> Unemployment rallies didn't lead to war, they were just unpleasant. Yeah, that's why we call it "The Great Unpleasantness", and not something like "The Great Depression".

drzaiusapelord 9y ago
Did it result in civil war or WWIII? That's my point. A lot of people on HN see what's happening and assume it'll lead to WWIII. It won't and its silly to think so. It'll continue the "rust belting" of America, where areas that can't compete, won't, and will be dependent on aid from the government. Again, this has been going on for a long time. Just because Millenials have only noticed this recently doesn't change a thing. This is also why some think some kind of UBI is going to be in the works in the near future. Society can handle x amount of permanently impoverished areas, but when does x become too large? The whole point of things like job tax credits, welfare, unemployment, re-training, local investment, etc is to keep people from civil unrest. UBI is just those things without the pretense that you'll ever get a job. Truck drivers in their 50s who never went to college aren't going to become competitive software developers no matter how much "training" you throw at them.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Didn't it? I mean, the equivalent of Great Depression across the pond was one of the primary (if not the primary) things that let Hitler rise to power in Germany and eventually to start WWII.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  Something doesn't have to result in global thermonuclear war to be considered bad, and for us to want to avoid it. I don't want my kid to grow up in another depression. And there's been all sort of arguments (that I'm not qualified to evaluate) that the US Civil War was a direct result of economic conflict, due to the North being a much more economically productive region than the South.