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Horses aren't the center of the economy, though. It's fundamentally different. Horses might always want more and more things no matter how much they get. But t

Horses aren't the center of the economy, though. It's fundamentally different. Horses might always want more and more things no matter how much they get. But they don't create demand in our economy, so we'll never know. No matter how much humans get, they'll always want more. And other humans will have to come up with ways to meet that demand. Sure - if we ever reach a time where the entire human race says "this is enough" and everything is automated, then there won't be any jobs. But we're a very far way away from that point. In 2013, 60% of people on the planet didn't even have a toilet [1]. There are obvious problems. In the Western world, it certainly seems like we don't have enough jobs for workers without certain skillsets - or at least jobs that employers are willing to pay minimum wage for. But there are also lots of jobs available. [1] https://slate.com/technology/2013/02/60-percent-of-the-world-population-still-without-toilets.html https://slate.com/technology/2013/02/60-percent-of-the-world...

S_A_P 6y ago
I think this is a good take- Having things be better for horses was never the point of the economy. In fact horses were probably the main driver for developing mechanical solutions since horse ownership is expensive and time consuming. There was no incentive to make life/jobs better for horses, and as soon as a better replacement was available horses were not necessary for most people. So you cant swap out horses for humans as they analogy is completely flawed.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  But having things be better for humans was never the point of the economy either. The actual point has always been making things better for a subset of humans, everywhere throughout history. I don't see why an unemployable horse would be considered any differently from an unemployable human to the cold profit motive.
  - simonh 6y ago
    Until true modern style democracy yes, but in modern democracies the people get to decide how the country and the economy are run. Yes, really. The fact that the consensus view happens not to align with what some people (perhaps yourself included) seem to think it should doesn't make that not true. Sometimes that leads to really unfortunate outcomes (in my view) like Trump and Brexit, but those things were the result of genuine democratic processes and driven by the choices of individual voters. That's true generally in the democratic world too. It may be convenient to blame the state of the world on shadowy anti-democratic forces running things from the shadows, because that can be used to de-legitimise the current state of the democratic world, but I'm afraid that's self-delusion. This is the world we have chosen through a process of consensus and compromise.
  - account42 6y ago
    The difference is that if there are enough unemployable humans they can vote, rebel or otherwise enforce that they get a share of the profit. Horses did not have that option.
- alpha_squared 6y ago
  What's the incentive to make life/jobs better for humans?
  - S_A_P 6y ago
    Incentive? not having to do hard labor? making more money? I think that most technology has made life easier if not measurably better for humans. Medicine, machinery, transportation. Those things dont make life better for people? I suppose the cynical take could be that it is for the 'ruling class' but I think the measured take is that even the lower rungs of society have at least some access to better jobs than they did 100 years ago.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      The lower rungs of society have access to better jobs because they were needed by the ruling class as a workforce, and because technology advanced. As a result of the above two, they were able to negotiate economic power and better working conditions. What is the incentive for "wasting resources on the lower rungs of society" when you don't need them as workers anymore?
- Barrin92 6y ago
  >Having things be better for horses was never the point of the economy Neither was making things better for humans. The point of the economy is for capital to reproduce itself, humans being taken care of is an accidental side effect because capital doesn't like a torch mob very much.
  - themacguffinman 6y ago
    Things only have economic value because humans want those things. Capital doesn't have any desires or drives on its own, owners of capital do. Capital owners are humans. Whatever you might say about capitalism, the idea that it doesn't serve humans or can somehow function without humans is just totally wrong. Capitalist economies aren't just human-centric, they are literally collections of human wants and needs.
    - Barrin92 6y ago
      >they are literally collections of human wants and needs. And humans are literally just collections of cells, does that mean you have no wants and that your pancreas is running the show? It's very arrogant to think that only humans have desires. Nations have desires, institutions have desires, and capital itself has a lot of desires. Lots of scary entities out there that have desires. When capital is unhappy with capital owners it's prone to fire all of them, reconfigure entire industries, eliminate entire sectors of human activity, redraw nation-states and in the not so distant future probably reconfigure human bodies. Of all the firms in human existence maybe a fraction of a percent are still around. You think the 'owners' of capital wanted that to happen? Capital keeps tagging along, individual actors, not so much. Give it another few decades and you may interact with a lot of firms that have no human working for it at all, and possibly not even one owning it.
      - themacguffinman 6y ago
        Nation-state desires & institutional desires are human desires. Capital can't "fire" capital owners, that's just a non-sequitur, the very concept of capital ownership is both defined and enforced by human beings. Other capital owners and consumers, ie. humans, fire them. Yes, entire industries are reconfigured and nation-states are redrawn because some humans want them to be reconfigured. This seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of what people mean when they refer to organizations as entities. One might group together the common interests of an organization as a whole for the sake of simplifying discussion, but that in no way implies that an organization is actually some kind of inhuman entity that functions without humans. When people say "the government wants X" or "Britain doesn't like Y", they don't mean it literally. Government is nothing without the human politicians and officials it's comprised of and/or the human citizens that recognize its authority. A hundred dollar bill is worth nothing without humans to want it and the things it can buy. Suggesting that capitalism can produce non-human economic value contradicts the most basic definition of economic value. And no, I don't think only humans have desires, but the capitalist economy we have created is based on human desires. Horses clearly have desires too, but thus far they have not invented an economy to serve horse desires. It wasn't non-existent horse capitalism that replaced horses, it was human capitalism. > Of all the firms in human existence maybe a fraction of a percent are still around. You think the 'owners' of capital wanted that to happen? Yes actually, I don't know why you think that's somehow undesirable. A lot of firms fail to adapt to human desires & needs so humans drop them. I'm honestly confused at the implication that capital owners want a lot of "firms" to exist when they're only a means to an end.
- maxsilver 6y ago
  > So you cant swap out horses for humans as they analogy is completely flawed. You kind of can though. The economy cares about no one, it cares only about capital. And as far as capital is concerned, humans are just fancy horses. Humans are expenses that need minimizing to the point of zeroing. In a perfectly efficient capitalist economy, no one pays any humans for anything ever.
sudosysgen 6y ago
I can't get myself to agree with this. Indeed, it's true, horses don't create demand, but neither do unemployed humans. Our economy isn't centred around humans, it's centred around capital. Unemployable humans are as useless to it as horses, as they can't exchange their labour with capital owners (or become capital owners themselves). Unemployable people might want more, but will they get more? No, they won't.
- bnralt 6y ago
  I think there's two distinct ideas being discussed. Can people be unemployed because of structural, societal, or political reasons? Sure, and I think most people would agree. We have plenty of example of that happening - depressions, recessions, mass refugees, etc. But can people be unemployed because we run out of things for humans to do? That's what the video is arguing, but it won't be the case unless we've fully satisfied all of our desires. If we haven't, there are, by definition, still things to do. This idea was particularly popular during the recession (the video was made on the tale end of it). It was common to hear that the high level of unemployment was because automation had taken our jobs or because Americans didn't have the skills for the jobs that were needed. But much of this was nonsense, and we saw employment gradually rebound as we moved out of the recession. Not only nonsense, but dangerous nonsense, since it leads people to entirely misunderstand a solvable problem.
  - darawk 6y ago
    > I think there's two distinct ideas being discussed. Can people be unemployed because of structural, societal, or political reasons? Sure, and I think most people would agree. We have plenty of example of that happening - depressions, recessions, mass refugees, etc. > But can people be unemployed because we run out of things for humans to do? That's what the video is arguing, but it won't be the case unless we've fully satisfied all of our desires. If we haven't, there are, by definition, still things to do. The question at hand though is exactly why is this true of humans but not horses?
    - bnralt 6y ago
corecursion 6y ago
As you pointed out there has been high demand for toilets even during recent years, and yet unemployment is a thing that still exists in the world. Where are all the toilet-manufacturing and toilet-installing jobs? We certainly have the technology to produce billions of toilets if we as a society decided to. We know there are billions of humans who need toilets, why isn't this demand creating jobs? Where are the toilets? A big part of the answer to that question is that the billions of people who need toilets can't afford them, because they don't have jobs that would enable them to pay for toilets. Toilets are so easy to manufacture at our technological level that toilet factories don't require many workers. Certainly not billions of workers, but we have billions of humans who need toilets. Maybe the same problem affects all products. Will technology advance until 10000 or 10 or zero human workers will be required to run all the factories in the entire world for every imaginable product? Where then will billions of unemployed humans get money to buy the products from those factories?

S_A_P 6y ago

I think this is a good take- Having things be better for horses was never the point of the economy. In fact horses were probably the main driver for developing mechanical solutions since horse ownership is expensive and time consuming. There was no incentive to make life/jobs better for horses, and as soon as a better replacement was available horses were not necessary for most people. So you cant swap out horses for humans as they analogy is completely flawed.

sudosysgen 6y ago
But having things be better for humans was never the point of the economy either. The actual point has always been making things better for a subset of humans, everywhere throughout history. I don't see why an unemployable horse would be considered any differently from an unemployable human to the cold profit motive.
- simonh 6y ago
  Until true modern style democracy yes, but in modern democracies the people get to decide how the country and the economy are run. Yes, really. The fact that the consensus view happens not to align with what some people (perhaps yourself included) seem to think it should doesn't make that not true. Sometimes that leads to really unfortunate outcomes (in my view) like Trump and Brexit, but those things were the result of genuine democratic processes and driven by the choices of individual voters. That's true generally in the democratic world too. It may be convenient to blame the state of the world on shadowy anti-democratic forces running things from the shadows, because that can be used to de-legitimise the current state of the democratic world, but I'm afraid that's self-delusion. This is the world we have chosen through a process of consensus and compromise.
- account42 6y ago
  The difference is that if there are enough unemployable humans they can vote, rebel or otherwise enforce that they get a share of the profit. Horses did not have that option.
alpha_squared 6y ago
What's the incentive to make life/jobs better for humans?
- S_A_P 6y ago
  Incentive? not having to do hard labor? making more money? I think that most technology has made life easier if not measurably better for humans. Medicine, machinery, transportation. Those things dont make life better for people? I suppose the cynical take could be that it is for the 'ruling class' but I think the measured take is that even the lower rungs of society have at least some access to better jobs than they did 100 years ago.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    The lower rungs of society have access to better jobs because they were needed by the ruling class as a workforce, and because technology advanced. As a result of the above two, they were able to negotiate economic power and better working conditions. What is the incentive for "wasting resources on the lower rungs of society" when you don't need them as workers anymore?
Barrin92 6y ago
>Having things be better for horses was never the point of the economy Neither was making things better for humans. The point of the economy is for capital to reproduce itself, humans being taken care of is an accidental side effect because capital doesn't like a torch mob very much.
- themacguffinman 6y ago
  Things only have economic value because humans want those things. Capital doesn't have any desires or drives on its own, owners of capital do. Capital owners are humans. Whatever you might say about capitalism, the idea that it doesn't serve humans or can somehow function without humans is just totally wrong. Capitalist economies aren't just human-centric, they are literally collections of human wants and needs.
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    >they are literally collections of human wants and needs. And humans are literally just collections of cells, does that mean you have no wants and that your pancreas is running the show? It's very arrogant to think that only humans have desires. Nations have desires, institutions have desires, and capital itself has a lot of desires. Lots of scary entities out there that have desires. When capital is unhappy with capital owners it's prone to fire all of them, reconfigure entire industries, eliminate entire sectors of human activity, redraw nation-states and in the not so distant future probably reconfigure human bodies. Of all the firms in human existence maybe a fraction of a percent are still around. You think the 'owners' of capital wanted that to happen? Capital keeps tagging along, individual actors, not so much. Give it another few decades and you may interact with a lot of firms that have no human working for it at all, and possibly not even one owning it.
    - themacguffinman 6y ago
      Nation-state desires & institutional desires are human desires. Capital can't "fire" capital owners, that's just a non-sequitur, the very concept of capital ownership is both defined and enforced by human beings. Other capital owners and consumers, ie. humans, fire them. Yes, entire industries are reconfigured and nation-states are redrawn because some humans want them to be reconfigured. This seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of what people mean when they refer to organizations as entities. One might group together the common interests of an organization as a whole for the sake of simplifying discussion, but that in no way implies that an organization is actually some kind of inhuman entity that functions without humans. When people say "the government wants X" or "Britain doesn't like Y", they don't mean it literally. Government is nothing without the human politicians and officials it's comprised of and/or the human citizens that recognize its authority. A hundred dollar bill is worth nothing without humans to want it and the things it can buy. Suggesting that capitalism can produce non-human economic value contradicts the most basic definition of economic value. And no, I don't think only humans have desires, but the capitalist economy we have created is based on human desires. Horses clearly have desires too, but thus far they have not invented an economy to serve horse desires. It wasn't non-existent horse capitalism that replaced horses, it was human capitalism. > Of all the firms in human existence maybe a fraction of a percent are still around. You think the 'owners' of capital wanted that to happen? Yes actually, I don't know why you think that's somehow undesirable. A lot of firms fail to adapt to human desires & needs so humans drop them. I'm honestly confused at the implication that capital owners want a lot of "firms" to exist when they're only a means to an end.
maxsilver 6y ago
> So you cant swap out horses for humans as they analogy is completely flawed. You kind of can though. The economy cares about no one, it cares only about capital. And as far as capital is concerned, humans are just fancy horses. Humans are expenses that need minimizing to the point of zeroing. In a perfectly efficient capitalist economy, no one pays any humans for anything ever.

sudosysgen 6y ago

I can't get myself to agree with this. Indeed, it's true, horses don't create demand, but neither do unemployed humans. Our economy isn't centred around humans, it's centred around capital. Unemployable humans are as useless to it as horses, as they can't exchange their labour with capital owners (or become capital owners themselves). Unemployable people might want more, but will they get more? No, they won't.

bnralt 6y ago
I think there's two distinct ideas being discussed. Can people be unemployed because of structural, societal, or political reasons? Sure, and I think most people would agree. We have plenty of example of that happening - depressions, recessions, mass refugees, etc. But can people be unemployed because we run out of things for humans to do? That's what the video is arguing, but it won't be the case unless we've fully satisfied all of our desires. If we haven't, there are, by definition, still things to do. This idea was particularly popular during the recession (the video was made on the tale end of it). It was common to hear that the high level of unemployment was because automation had taken our jobs or because Americans didn't have the skills for the jobs that were needed. But much of this was nonsense, and we saw employment gradually rebound as we moved out of the recession. Not only nonsense, but dangerous nonsense, since it leads people to entirely misunderstand a solvable problem.
- darawk 6y ago
  > I think there's two distinct ideas being discussed. Can people be unemployed because of structural, societal, or political reasons? Sure, and I think most people would agree. We have plenty of example of that happening - depressions, recessions, mass refugees, etc. > But can people be unemployed because we run out of things for humans to do? That's what the video is arguing, but it won't be the case unless we've fully satisfied all of our desires. If we haven't, there are, by definition, still things to do. The question at hand though is exactly why is this true of humans but not horses?
  - bnralt 6y ago

corecursion 6y ago

As you pointed out there has been high demand for toilets even during recent years, and yet unemployment is a thing that still exists in the world. Where are all the toilet-manufacturing and toilet-installing jobs? We certainly have the technology to produce billions of toilets if we as a society decided to. We know there are billions of humans who need toilets, why isn't this demand creating jobs? Where are the toilets? A big part of the answer to that question is that the billions of people who need toilets can't afford them, because they don't have jobs that would enable them to pay for toilets. Toilets are so easy to manufacture at our technological level that toilet factories don't require many workers. Certainly not billions of workers, but we have billions of humans who need toilets. Maybe the same problem affects all products. Will technology advance until 10000 or 10 or zero human workers will be required to run all the factories in the entire world for every imaginable product? Where then will billions of unemployed humans get money to buy the products from those factories?