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Technological disruption can often be a good thing - more/better product/services can be had for less money - I don’t think the HN crowd needs to be convinced o
by GuiA 9y ago
Technological disruption can often be a good thing - more/better product/services can be had for less money - I don’t think the HN crowd needs to be convinced of this.
However, it also means that in the short term, the people doing the work that has been disrupted are going to be impacted. And while a few Stanford grads can push an app at the click of a button, it takes humans much longer to adapt to the changes engendered, particularly if they’ve been doing the same job in the same city for 30 years, supporting a family with that income, and all of a sudden that job only generates a fraction of the money it once did.
Ideally, the society in which this occurs would have a number of safety nets (public healthcare, housing/food assistance, cheap/free education, reliable and affordable public transportation, etc) to ensure that those people do not suffer too much because of the transition.
Put simply, the US does not have many of these safety nets. Labor protection laws are a joke - the US still has no laws mandating paid maternity leave, for one example amongst many. Healthcare is a disaster, meaning that if you are unemployed and get seriously sick, it could literally spell the end of your life. Education is very expensive, making a professional reconversion hard to fathom for most. And housing prices in large cities are spiraling out of control, meaning that if you can’t make rent, homelessness is often the next step.
Uber, and so many companies like it, are improvements in some ways - who knows how long it would have taken for taxi companies to let people summon a car from a tap of a button on their phone. But in doing so, they’re also destroying the livelihoods of many. If the taxes that Uber paid were put to good use by the US government to offer support in all the ways we’ve seen above to those affected, it wouldn’t be as much of a problem. But here we are.
- hmschreck 9y agoI can agree with most of this - the taxes of the disruptors destroying an industry should absolutely be used to help those displaced. At the same time, people affected need to be realistic. There is no protection for them, so complaining about the changes while doing nothing to help yourself is just a losing game.
- coolaliasbro 9y agoComplaining draws attention which can lead to interest and eventually actionable conditions for a greater group of individuals than just the affected. Also, when one is scrambling to make ends meet, it's not always so easy to be more proactive. Surviving in such situations consumes a lot of mental, emotional, and temporal resources.
- peacetreefrog 9y agoNice in theory, but implementing well functioning safety nets is easier said than done. A lot of the problems you allude to in healthcare, housing, education stem from previous well meaning attempts that ended up making things worse.
- djsumdog 9y agoYou'd need basic minimum income, and that's not possible with the current currency distribution in America. It'd require radical changes in so many things, including the American attitude to social welfare (which is shameful compared to our European counterparts where people who disabilities get enough to buy houses and maintain a decent standard of living).