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They wouldn't if they received any benefit from that automation.

• mruts 7y ago
  Of course they do, in the 3rd world country I live in you see construction workers hauling rocks by hand with no shoes on. Certainly seems to me that things have gotten a lot better in America in the last 200 years.
  • afiori 7y ago
    And everybody is thankful for that, still a different kind of reaction is needed when automation creates huge regions full of unemployed workers and no jobs with comparable skill requirements. If the perfect cheap robot could take instantly over all human occupations nobody would ever have to work a day in their life.
  • vintermann 7y ago
    > It is the interaction of productivity and inequality that makes societies vulnerable to idle unemployment. The poor in technologically primitive societies hustle to live. In relatively equal, technologically advanced societies, people create plenty of demand for one another’s services. But when productivity and inequality are combined, we get a highly productive elite that cannot provide adequate employment, and a mass of people who preserve more value by remaining idle and cutting consumption than by attempting low-productivity work. Steve Randy Waldman wrote a post about "Tradeoffs between inequality and employment", https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/3487.html https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/3487.html - recommended.