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>Eventually there simply won't be enough work to do for 100% of the population to do something People always claim this, yet with ever increasing population, w

>Eventually there simply won't be enough work to do for 100% of the population to do something People always claim this, yet with ever increasing population, we continue to find work for people to do. Who would have guessed when the Earth's population was 1 million people that'd we eventually have billions of jobs. So there is really no reason for there to not be enough work to do. If each person consumes enough in life to equal once person's work output, then every additional person will work enough to get enough to consume for themselves by trading with others. As long as people can trade the result of their effort for the efforts of others, there is no reason we will ever run out of jobs. In fact, there's likely now and always will be things we could do except we simply don't have enough workers to do it. Each big technological change in the past freed workers from previous drudgery and opened up large swaths of working people to provide labor for the next wave of innovation. There's no need innovation ever ends. This scaling has always worked, from societies of a few people to countries with a billion people. And there's no shortage of work still to be done.

yunwal 4y ago
> People always claim this, yet with ever increasing population, we continue to find work for people to do. Ah yes thank god we have more paper pushers in hospitals than doctors. Otherwise who would push the paper?
- SideQuark 4y ago
  It's a good thing we have plenty of needed jobs, even when the everyday person doesn't understand reasons for those jobs, to the point of confusing their own ignorance with misguided malice to the workers doing jobs they don't understand. It's the modern equivalent of tribespeople throwing rocks at the moon. A good place to learn in life is when you don't understand why something exists or how it works, instead of immediately writing it off with intellectually lazy hatred and dismissiveness, spend some time understanding what came before, what problems the current solution solves, and why things are as they are. You'll be amazed and the nuance and insights generations of clever people solving problems have passed on for situations you currently don't see or understand. You'll end up happier and have a better understanding of the world.
  - isleyaardvark 4y ago
    It's quite a different thing when up to 40% of the workers themselves think their own jobs are unneeded: https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/06/29/bullshit-jobs-and-the-yoke-of-managerial-feudalism https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/06/29/bullshit-jo...
    - SideQuark 4y ago
      ... and when people think quoting David Graber is an accurate assessment of reality. Or simply google ample rebuttals to Graber's entire thesis, well backed with empirical evidence, such as [1], "Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs", which categorically demolishes this stupid line of claims via careful empirical research across large numbers of people. "The proportion of employees describing their jobs as useless is low and declining and bears little relationship to Graeber’s predictions." And a large amount of people believing a thing are not the same thing as truth, as evidenced by countless mass misconceptions from the trivial to the insane. The problem with ideas like this, just like any number of wild ideas, is that they're easier to manufacture than accurate explanations, so there's more of them, and people with itchy brains love to latch onto them, but they pass by over and over without people actually realizing they're all the same nonsense - wishful simple explanations for complex phenomena. And then people regurgitate it over and over on the internet because it sounds nice to them, but they cannot be bothered to see what follow-up actual scholars did to debunk it. For example, if all these jobs are bullshit, then start a company with none of them, and crush all the others since they're wasting sooooo much time and money and resources... But that has happened exactly zero times. And will happen zero times more. Care to explain why short of invoking massive Illuminati world conspiracy nonsense? I believe reality. [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170211015067 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170211015067
      - yunwal 4y ago
        > For example, if all these jobs are bullshit, then start a company with none of them, and crush all the others since they're wasting sooooo much time and money and resources... Awesome to see a person in real life who thinks all markets are perfectly competitive and that there’s no such thing as anticompetitive behavior or fixed costs.
sebzim4500 4y ago
>People always claim this, yet with ever increasing population, we continue to find work for people to do. The reason I expect employment to eventually be much less than 50% is automation not population growth. In the past when one industry gets automated people move to another industry, but I don't see how that happens when/if we have human level AI.

yunwal 4y ago

> People always claim this, yet with ever increasing population, we continue to find work for people to do. Ah yes thank god we have more paper pushers in hospitals than doctors. Otherwise who would push the paper?

SideQuark 4y ago
It's a good thing we have plenty of needed jobs, even when the everyday person doesn't understand reasons for those jobs, to the point of confusing their own ignorance with misguided malice to the workers doing jobs they don't understand. It's the modern equivalent of tribespeople throwing rocks at the moon. A good place to learn in life is when you don't understand why something exists or how it works, instead of immediately writing it off with intellectually lazy hatred and dismissiveness, spend some time understanding what came before, what problems the current solution solves, and why things are as they are. You'll be amazed and the nuance and insights generations of clever people solving problems have passed on for situations you currently don't see or understand. You'll end up happier and have a better understanding of the world.
- isleyaardvark 4y ago
  It's quite a different thing when up to 40% of the workers themselves think their own jobs are unneeded: https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/06/29/bullshit-jobs-and-the-yoke-of-managerial-feudalism https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/06/29/bullshit-jo...
  - SideQuark 4y ago
    ... and when people think quoting David Graber is an accurate assessment of reality. Or simply google ample rebuttals to Graber's entire thesis, well backed with empirical evidence, such as [1], "Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs", which categorically demolishes this stupid line of claims via careful empirical research across large numbers of people. "The proportion of employees describing their jobs as useless is low and declining and bears little relationship to Graeber’s predictions." And a large amount of people believing a thing are not the same thing as truth, as evidenced by countless mass misconceptions from the trivial to the insane. The problem with ideas like this, just like any number of wild ideas, is that they're easier to manufacture than accurate explanations, so there's more of them, and people with itchy brains love to latch onto them, but they pass by over and over without people actually realizing they're all the same nonsense - wishful simple explanations for complex phenomena. And then people regurgitate it over and over on the internet because it sounds nice to them, but they cannot be bothered to see what follow-up actual scholars did to debunk it. For example, if all these jobs are bullshit, then start a company with none of them, and crush all the others since they're wasting sooooo much time and money and resources... But that has happened exactly zero times. And will happen zero times more. Care to explain why short of invoking massive Illuminati world conspiracy nonsense? I believe reality. [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170211015067 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170211015067
    - yunwal 4y ago
      > For example, if all these jobs are bullshit, then start a company with none of them, and crush all the others since they're wasting sooooo much time and money and resources... Awesome to see a person in real life who thinks all markets are perfectly competitive and that there’s no such thing as anticompetitive behavior or fixed costs.

sebzim4500 4y ago

>People always claim this, yet with ever increasing population, we continue to find work for people to do. The reason I expect employment to eventually be much less than 50% is automation not population growth. In the past when one industry gets automated people move to another industry, but I don't see how that happens when/if we have human level AI.