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It gives a bunch of people jobs that wouldn't otherwise have one
by SJC_Hacker 3y ago
It gives a bunch of people jobs that wouldn't otherwise have one
- lxgr 3y agoI've never understood why job creation would be considered something desirable in and of itself. Doesn't it make much more sense for a society as a whole to optimize for efficiency and then reallocate the now-redundant employees to tasks that actually need them? And even disregarding that, practically, the kind of people working in HFT usually have a skill sets that make them highly employable anywhere. If anything, HFT is draining some of the best mathematicians and software engineers from other projects that can't afford to pay as well.
- SJC_Hacker 3y agoWho gets to define whats most efficient? And sadly, society grossly misallocates its resources when you think about whats right. Its more important that we live in huge/new houses and drive new cars and have nice vacations than fund to finding a cure for cancer, and people make this decision every day.
- lxgr 3y agoIf we have the option to make a human's job redundant through automation (without a disproportional reduction in quality), but choose not to because of "preserving jobs", that's inefficient. In my view, it's disingenuous and cynical towards the person doing the job: They're effectively historical actors in a museum because we haven't figured out how else to solve for the distribution of monetary and "soft" values like societal status, feeling like a productive member of society etc. There's nothing at all wrong in my view with letting people do what they want and cross-subsidizing that activity as a society, but why not call it what it is? And why stop at office-style work and exclude e.g. art?