4 ms·

As someone who attended this school and has a degree from their economics department: this finding very consistent from what I learned in classes covering the e

As someone who attended this school and has a degree from their economics department: this finding very consistent from what I learned in classes covering the economics of innovation. Historically, technological revolutions have increased productivity and labor force participation, despite many pundits at the time worried about loss of jobs. The core intuition for this phenomenon is that human society overall takes the tech productivity gains to do more things overall, creating new goods and services. The broader range of goods and services overall also enables more people to find work. Put another way, "“One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static – they go up. It’s human nature. You cannot rest on your laurels in this world. Customers won’t have it.” -- one of Bezos's Amazon shareholder letters. One of my favorite counterintuitive examples: The biggest economic gains from the 1800s Industrial Revolution actually came from the humble washer/dryer. By making routine homeware 100x more efficient, this (along with other home appliances) allowed more women to enter the labor force, nearly doubling labor force participation within a couple generations. Though, at the beginning, lots of people were opining about homemakers losing a sense of purpose or relaxing all the time. It's certainly possible that this study is just reinforcing the researcher's biases from their previous understanding of the economics of innovation, and also possible that this study is accurate today but conditions will change in the future. That said, I believe the burden of proof is on the pundits claiming cataclysmic job loss, which is counter to economic historians' models of innovation.

mamami 1y ago
This perspective very much ignores economic friction. The luddites were a thing because, metaphorically, not every washer can become a programmer. These large scale analyses often treat one person losing their job and a different person finding a job as equivalent, which does not reflect any kind of material reality
- grafmax 1y ago
  Yeah actually the labor conditions of the working class were horrible as they entered factories, conditions only remedied by the spurs of the labor movement.
  - sskates 1y ago
    Being a farmer was worse!
    - grafmax 1y ago
      Farming was bad, but before the labor movement, factories were generally worse. People chose to move to factories not because they were superior to farming but because their old livelihoods were taken from them.
      - Jensson 1y ago
        Factories paid better. The working conditions might have been bad but factories paid so much more that people did it anyway, it isn't that you couldn't be a farmer but working in a factory made you richer.
    - achierius 1y ago
      No, that's not true. We can tell because farmers, by and large, strongly resisted attempts to push them off of their land, and generally only moved into cities in large surges every time the economy slumped (Baumol's cost disease having lead to cost increases for the tools they needed to do their farming). Before the modern era, cities were actually net-negative growth rates due to disease, starvation, exposure, murder, etc. -- a fact which was certainly not true of the countryside. Even just operationally we can think -- how common was it for farmers to lose an arm to a threshing machine, to develop black lung from inhaling coal, to take orders from another man like he was their boss? People liked being farmers, people liked owning their own land, people liked being their own boss, people liked feeding themselves, people liked to be independent and self-reliant. All of that goes away when one moves to the city to work in a factory or mine. What you're saying is a common understanding, but it's a false one, rooted in Victorian-era attitudes towards medieval peasants that really have nothing to do with reality.
      - jcranmer 1y ago
        I must disagree. The most important thing to understand about peasant farmers is that their economic prospects are tied to the availability of land, and land is a finite resource of which there is not enough and no more can be had. Most pre-modern societies are set up to extract every possible extra amount of food produced, which basically means that in times of plenty, you get more people who have no work available for them (which means they up and leave to the cities, the only places which have the sufficient labor pool). > People liked being farmers, people liked owning their own land, people liked being their own boss, people liked feeding themselves, people liked to be independent and self-reliant. Oooh boy. There's a vast array of different socioeconomic statuses varying through time and space, but broadly speaking, most peasants did not own their own land, and even the majority of people who did own their own land did not own enough to feed themselves from their own land. And even if you did own your land and enough of it to feed your family, you probably still need to borrow the plow and oxen teams, and other farming implements, from your local lord. And since you are perennially on borderline starvation, you're not independent and self-reliant, you're entirely reliant on the village communal support to help you get through those times when your fields were a little bare. Pretending that medieval peasantry was some sort of idyllic lifestyle is exactly the kind of Victorian-era fantasy you're decrying. What peasant life offered wasn't comfort but stability. Peasant life may suck, but at least you knew what you were in for. If you moved to a city (let alone further away), you left your support network, you left everybody you knew, maybe for a shot at a better life... but with essentially no recourse if anything failed. Or you could stay, where things wouldn't get better, but they also wouldn't get worse. Unless there were a major calamity and staying wasn't an option.
- anon7725 1y ago
  The Luddite analogy is apt, however its sense is opposite to the way that it’s usually presented. The Luddites were skilled artisans in the textile industry. They often worked from home, owning spinning and weaving equipment and acting as what we’d call independent contractors today. The mechanization of the textile industry resulted in work that required less skill and had to be performed in a dangerous factory for suppressed wages that were determined by a cartel of factory owners rather than a robust market of small makers. Sitting here 200 years on from the Industrial Revolution it seems to be an obvious good. But it sure did not sound like an appealing thing to live through if you weren’t one of the few owners of the means of production.
  - sethammons 1y ago
    The pollution and waste of textiles brings into question the obvious good. Yes, we have $5 shirts. But also yes, we "donate" old clothes and those donations end up clotting the beaches of impoverished nations. Scrub through this report from ABC so your stomach can do backflips on how bad externalities are not tracked in modern prices: https://youtu.be/bB3kuuBPVys?si=Lgb4z-nvrXqYkLQt https://youtu.be/bB3kuuBPVys?si=Lgb4z-nvrXqYkLQt
trashface 1y ago
Tell me more, I'm long term unemployed so have plenty of time to read stuff like this.
- mushufasa 1y ago
  Here's one free article covering a book about the washing machine example https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/aug/29/my-bright-idea-ha-joon-chang https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/aug/29/my-bright...
  - trashface 1y ago
    Washing machines are indeed super handy. I really appreciate it when I can use the one at my parent's place or the laundromat.
Workaccount2 1y ago
I think the main fear is that AI is a companion that keeps getting better, rather than a tool that is nothing on it's own. We've never had that before.
- pixl97 1y ago
  And really it's a whole bunch of things we've never had before at the same time. Factories can scale to the point that a single factory for a lot of products can meet the needs of all of humanity. Add in economies of scale and the number of actual work on the actual product jobs decreases for any one product over time. Information technology can scale to the point that any one company can manage vast oceans of data about processes and conditions in the business exercising large amounts of control over economies. Shipping and transport are fast, cheap, and ubiquitous. That huge factory from above can make anything then ship it anywhere cheaper than you can make it right next door. Robots and further AI automation can insure the investor class gets even wealthier by not having to pay things like the 16 hours a day you don't work in health insurance. More so there is never a labor shortage by pesky striking workers asking for more pay or better conditions. All the above setup conditions for the consolidation of control of almost everything by a very small number of entities.
- keeda 1y ago
  Another thing we never had before is the huge skill differential between the jobs that will be automated away and the jobs that replace them. In the past, automation created new jobs that were higher-skilled, but still relatively easy for any of the displaced workforce to upskill to. E.g. if a machine replaced the work you did manually, it was not too difficult to learn to operate that machine. But with AI the skills gap is huge. Taking software engineering as an example, previously a motivated bootcamp graduate could start churning out basic CRUD apps and be useful. Now a motivated senior engineer with AI agents could churn out an app a day. So the minimum useful skill-level is now at the level of a senior engineer. And this is possible because of yet another thing we never had before: A "universal" knowledge worker machine. Knowledge work was "safe" because it was a relatively high-skill category and automation was only possible through software, which was expensive and slow to build, largely due to a shortage of software developers. Now we potentially don't even need software for a huge range of cognitive tasks! Of course, the stochastic nature of AI probably means we will be writing software for a long time yet, but as above, existing (senior) developers can scale themselves up much, much faster.
harrall 1y ago
Historically it seems humanity is often better off after major advances. But it’s the transition that is the problem. The people living through the transition have to go through hell.
- newyankee 1y ago
  Especially from Global South who somehow do not even find a footnote in a lot of research
- Analemma_ 1y ago
  Yeah, I'm always annoyed at how blasé people are about these transition periods, where they seem to think the ends justify any means, and any chaos which happens as a result of the means. You see this all the time when some new technology, especially an information disintermediation technology, gets compared to the printing press. "The printing press broke the monopoly on knowledge and brought Europe out of the Dark Ages!" Yeah, but first it killed millions of people in a century of warfare. Do the people in an equivalent position now get a vote, or are they acceptable casualties for the glorious hypothetical future?
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    > Yeah, but first it killed millions of people in a century of warfare. Do the people in an equivalent position now get a vote, or are they acceptable casualties for the glorious hypothetical future? The answer seems to be we get no vote I'm not happy about it
  - spongebobstoes 1y ago
    Can you present a proposal for how should we adopt technology with less chaos? Are you accounting for the lives saved through better technology?
    - johnnyanmac 1y ago
      Yes. We compensate disrupted industries and make long term plans to adjust around the technologies. The advent of the PC exposed it early to kids, it advertised its usefulness to the public, and it offered digital trainings to adjust to a new workflow. In the worst case, we help any redundant roles get a new job in the indystry or offer other benefits like early pensions. As we see here, this tech is only taking and not giving much back.
throwup238 1y ago
> One of my favorite counterintuitive examples: The biggest economic gains from the 1800s Industrial Revolution actually came from the humble washer/dryer. By making routine homeware 100x more efficient, this (along with other home appliances) allowed more women to enter the labor force, nearly doubling labor force participation within a couple generations. Though, at the beginning, lots of people were opining about homemakers losing a sense of purpose or relaxing all the time. What exactly did your professors mean by "economic gain"? It'd probably take an entire thesis to unpack what that means and all the ambiguities that anyone could drive a train through. The only way I can square that circle is if they meant that women's economic prospects declined so much with the automation of textiles that they had nothing left but small efficiency gains. Maintenance tasks like clothes washing don't produce any economic value outside the household, whereas spinning/weaving/sewing produces something the household can sell, trade, or gift. Early textile mechanization took place decades before washing machines were even a novelty so sure, "biggest economic gain" as long as you're measuring from a local maxima.
- pixl97 1y ago
  Spinning and weaving had always been done by a relatively small portion of society. Hence by automating it you were not bringing time savings to the vast majority of people. Instead the opposite may have occurred, when cloth became cheaper and the amount of clothing increased greatly increasing the amount of washing the masses had to do.
  - throwup238 1y ago
    > Spinning and weaving had always been done by a relatively small portion of society. This is very, very incorrect. Egregiously so. All evidence from antiquity to pre-modern Europe contradicts it. Up until the mechanization of textiles, spinning and weaving took up the majority of women’s work time. Even noblewomen were painted doing the act. Annual labor hours were comparable to unskilled men in agriculture, even after mechanical innovations. If you’d like I can give you academic citations but acoup.blog written by an actual historian just ran an entire series on this topic: https://acoup.blog/2025/09/26/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ivd-spinning-plates/ https://acoup.blog/2025/09/26/collections-life-work-death-an... Subsistence for a small family meant nearly 1800 hours a year of work on just textiles, accounting for a single woman’s labor over an entire year. That’s just 200 hours short of a modern 9-5 work year. On just textiles.
johnnyanmac 1y ago
>Put another way, "“One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static – they go up. It’s human nature. You cannot rest on your laurels in this world. Customers won’t have it.” -- one of Bezos's Amazon shareholder letters. Nowadays, the new strategy is "you will own nothing, have worse more expensive services, and like it". The mood has completely shifted as of late. It feels more like the shareholder's demands are never static.
Animats 1y ago
> Historically, technological revolutions have increased productivity and labor force participation, despite many pundits at the time worried about loss of jobs. That was basically true from about 1830, when railroads came out of beta, to 1979.[1][2] During that period, wages roughly tracked productivity. There are solid US stats on this from at least 1950. This has happened in other countries, too, but generally later than in the US. Here's a study from Japan.[3] In the UK, productivity and wages parted company around 2008.[4] There are stats for China, but they only go back to 1995 and aren't taken that seriously even in China. Plus, China now has 200 million gig workers (!)[5] and data collection on them is weak. Official workforce size in China peaked in 2015, which may indicate that many gig workers are not being counted. This needs to be looked at more closely. Productivity is going great, but the gains don't go to workers much. [1] https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ [2] https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2023/03/when-comparing-wages-and-worker-productivity-the-price-measure-matters/ https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2023/03/when-comparing-wages... [3] https://www.rieti.go.jp/en/publications/summary/25090019.html https://www.rieti.go.jp/en/publications/summary/25090019.htm... [4] https://fraserofallander.org/link-labour-productivity-wage-growth-uk/ https://fraserofallander.org/link-labour-productivity-wage-g... [5] https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/09/18/chinas-200m-gig-workers-are-a-warning-for-the-world https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/09/18/chinas-200m-gig...
- anovikov 1y ago
  That's not about wages, but labor force participation. What changed around 1979 was that workers who were freed up due to automation, were employed in lower paid service roles that's why wages stopped following productivity. But they weren't left unemployed - through 1970s unemployment was quite high by today's standards, we are living in times of longest ever sustained low unemployment.
  - Animats 1y ago
    We're in sustained under-employment. About half of people in the US who have college degrees are working in jobs that don't need a degree. 70% of Uber drivers started driving after they lost a job. Unemployment of new college graduates has increased recently. This hit graduates of the computer boot camps a year or two ago, and this year it hit Berkeley CS graduates. Most people eventually find some kind of job. The alternative is being homeless.
tuatoru 1y ago
If AI takes a fraction α of jobs, for it to be employment increasing, elasticity of demand for labor needs to be 1/(1-α).
dfxm12 1y ago
You can't take these things in a vacuum. Labor has gotten weaker over time. AI just gives more power to employers. Take Klarna. They laid off 700 people, realized it was a mistake, but they are hiring people back as gig workers [0]. Not proper employees with a salary and benefits. The thing about the US in particular is that a job is not just a job. It's your social safety net, as too many welfare programs have onerous work requirements. Employers know this. They have way too much power, probably more than ever before in our lifetimes. AI gives them that much more power. 0 - https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/klarnas-ai-replaced-700-workers-now-the-fintech-ceo-wants-humans-back-after-40b-fall-11747573937564.html https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/klarnas-ai-replaced-...
- pyuser583 1y ago
  This is a relatively easy fix - separate benefits from specific jobs. There's a strong social element to jobs - it's not just money, it's your friends. But that's an easy fix too - forming social units not based on employers. Unions used to fill this role, as did guilds, and just plain clubs. These aren't huge problems.

mamami 1y ago

This perspective very much ignores economic friction. The luddites were a thing because, metaphorically, not every washer can become a programmer. These large scale analyses often treat one person losing their job and a different person finding a job as equivalent, which does not reflect any kind of material reality

grafmax 1y ago
Yeah actually the labor conditions of the working class were horrible as they entered factories, conditions only remedied by the spurs of the labor movement.
- sskates 1y ago
  Being a farmer was worse!
  - grafmax 1y ago
    Farming was bad, but before the labor movement, factories were generally worse. People chose to move to factories not because they were superior to farming but because their old livelihoods were taken from them.
    - Jensson 1y ago
      Factories paid better. The working conditions might have been bad but factories paid so much more that people did it anyway, it isn't that you couldn't be a farmer but working in a factory made you richer.
  - achierius 1y ago
    No, that's not true. We can tell because farmers, by and large, strongly resisted attempts to push them off of their land, and generally only moved into cities in large surges every time the economy slumped (Baumol's cost disease having lead to cost increases for the tools they needed to do their farming). Before the modern era, cities were actually net-negative growth rates due to disease, starvation, exposure, murder, etc. -- a fact which was certainly not true of the countryside. Even just operationally we can think -- how common was it for farmers to lose an arm to a threshing machine, to develop black lung from inhaling coal, to take orders from another man like he was their boss? People liked being farmers, people liked owning their own land, people liked being their own boss, people liked feeding themselves, people liked to be independent and self-reliant. All of that goes away when one moves to the city to work in a factory or mine. What you're saying is a common understanding, but it's a false one, rooted in Victorian-era attitudes towards medieval peasants that really have nothing to do with reality.
    - jcranmer 1y ago
      I must disagree. The most important thing to understand about peasant farmers is that their economic prospects are tied to the availability of land, and land is a finite resource of which there is not enough and no more can be had. Most pre-modern societies are set up to extract every possible extra amount of food produced, which basically means that in times of plenty, you get more people who have no work available for them (which means they up and leave to the cities, the only places which have the sufficient labor pool). > People liked being farmers, people liked owning their own land, people liked being their own boss, people liked feeding themselves, people liked to be independent and self-reliant. Oooh boy. There's a vast array of different socioeconomic statuses varying through time and space, but broadly speaking, most peasants did not own their own land, and even the majority of people who did own their own land did not own enough to feed themselves from their own land. And even if you did own your land and enough of it to feed your family, you probably still need to borrow the plow and oxen teams, and other farming implements, from your local lord. And since you are perennially on borderline starvation, you're not independent and self-reliant, you're entirely reliant on the village communal support to help you get through those times when your fields were a little bare. Pretending that medieval peasantry was some sort of idyllic lifestyle is exactly the kind of Victorian-era fantasy you're decrying. What peasant life offered wasn't comfort but stability. Peasant life may suck, but at least you knew what you were in for. If you moved to a city (let alone further away), you left your support network, you left everybody you knew, maybe for a shot at a better life... but with essentially no recourse if anything failed. Or you could stay, where things wouldn't get better, but they also wouldn't get worse. Unless there were a major calamity and staying wasn't an option.
anon7725 1y ago
The Luddite analogy is apt, however its sense is opposite to the way that it’s usually presented. The Luddites were skilled artisans in the textile industry. They often worked from home, owning spinning and weaving equipment and acting as what we’d call independent contractors today. The mechanization of the textile industry resulted in work that required less skill and had to be performed in a dangerous factory for suppressed wages that were determined by a cartel of factory owners rather than a robust market of small makers. Sitting here 200 years on from the Industrial Revolution it seems to be an obvious good. But it sure did not sound like an appealing thing to live through if you weren’t one of the few owners of the means of production.
- sethammons 1y ago
  The pollution and waste of textiles brings into question the obvious good. Yes, we have $5 shirts. But also yes, we "donate" old clothes and those donations end up clotting the beaches of impoverished nations. Scrub through this report from ABC so your stomach can do backflips on how bad externalities are not tracked in modern prices: https://youtu.be/bB3kuuBPVys?si=Lgb4z-nvrXqYkLQt https://youtu.be/bB3kuuBPVys?si=Lgb4z-nvrXqYkLQt

trashface 1y ago

Tell me more, I'm long term unemployed so have plenty of time to read stuff like this.

mushufasa 1y ago
Here's one free article covering a book about the washing machine example https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/aug/29/my-bright-idea-ha-joon-chang https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/aug/29/my-bright...
- trashface 1y ago
  Washing machines are indeed super handy. I really appreciate it when I can use the one at my parent's place or the laundromat.

Workaccount2 1y ago

I think the main fear is that AI is a companion that keeps getting better, rather than a tool that is nothing on it's own. We've never had that before.

pixl97 1y ago
And really it's a whole bunch of things we've never had before at the same time. Factories can scale to the point that a single factory for a lot of products can meet the needs of all of humanity. Add in economies of scale and the number of actual work on the actual product jobs decreases for any one product over time. Information technology can scale to the point that any one company can manage vast oceans of data about processes and conditions in the business exercising large amounts of control over economies. Shipping and transport are fast, cheap, and ubiquitous. That huge factory from above can make anything then ship it anywhere cheaper than you can make it right next door. Robots and further AI automation can insure the investor class gets even wealthier by not having to pay things like the 16 hours a day you don't work in health insurance. More so there is never a labor shortage by pesky striking workers asking for more pay or better conditions. All the above setup conditions for the consolidation of control of almost everything by a very small number of entities.
keeda 1y ago
Another thing we never had before is the huge skill differential between the jobs that will be automated away and the jobs that replace them. In the past, automation created new jobs that were higher-skilled, but still relatively easy for any of the displaced workforce to upskill to. E.g. if a machine replaced the work you did manually, it was not too difficult to learn to operate that machine. But with AI the skills gap is huge. Taking software engineering as an example, previously a motivated bootcamp graduate could start churning out basic CRUD apps and be useful. Now a motivated senior engineer with AI agents could churn out an app a day. So the minimum useful skill-level is now at the level of a senior engineer. And this is possible because of yet another thing we never had before: A "universal" knowledge worker machine. Knowledge work was "safe" because it was a relatively high-skill category and automation was only possible through software, which was expensive and slow to build, largely due to a shortage of software developers. Now we potentially don't even need software for a huge range of cognitive tasks! Of course, the stochastic nature of AI probably means we will be writing software for a long time yet, but as above, existing (senior) developers can scale themselves up much, much faster.

harrall 1y ago

Historically it seems humanity is often better off after major advances. But it’s the transition that is the problem. The people living through the transition have to go through hell.

newyankee 1y ago
Especially from Global South who somehow do not even find a footnote in a lot of research
Analemma_ 1y ago
Yeah, I'm always annoyed at how blasé people are about these transition periods, where they seem to think the ends justify any means, and any chaos which happens as a result of the means. You see this all the time when some new technology, especially an information disintermediation technology, gets compared to the printing press. "The printing press broke the monopoly on knowledge and brought Europe out of the Dark Ages!" Yeah, but first it killed millions of people in a century of warfare. Do the people in an equivalent position now get a vote, or are they acceptable casualties for the glorious hypothetical future?
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  > Yeah, but first it killed millions of people in a century of warfare. Do the people in an equivalent position now get a vote, or are they acceptable casualties for the glorious hypothetical future? The answer seems to be we get no vote I'm not happy about it
- spongebobstoes 1y ago
  Can you present a proposal for how should we adopt technology with less chaos? Are you accounting for the lives saved through better technology?
  - johnnyanmac 1y ago
    Yes. We compensate disrupted industries and make long term plans to adjust around the technologies. The advent of the PC exposed it early to kids, it advertised its usefulness to the public, and it offered digital trainings to adjust to a new workflow. In the worst case, we help any redundant roles get a new job in the indystry or offer other benefits like early pensions. As we see here, this tech is only taking and not giving much back.

throwup238 1y ago

> One of my favorite counterintuitive examples: The biggest economic gains from the 1800s Industrial Revolution actually came from the humble washer/dryer. By making routine homeware 100x more efficient, this (along with other home appliances) allowed more women to enter the labor force, nearly doubling labor force participation within a couple generations. Though, at the beginning, lots of people were opining about homemakers losing a sense of purpose or relaxing all the time. What exactly did your professors mean by "economic gain"? It'd probably take an entire thesis to unpack what that means and all the ambiguities that anyone could drive a train through. The only way I can square that circle is if they meant that women's economic prospects declined so much with the automation of textiles that they had nothing left but small efficiency gains. Maintenance tasks like clothes washing don't produce any economic value outside the household, whereas spinning/weaving/sewing produces something the household can sell, trade, or gift. Early textile mechanization took place decades before washing machines were even a novelty so sure, "biggest economic gain" as long as you're measuring from a local maxima.

pixl97 1y ago
Spinning and weaving had always been done by a relatively small portion of society. Hence by automating it you were not bringing time savings to the vast majority of people. Instead the opposite may have occurred, when cloth became cheaper and the amount of clothing increased greatly increasing the amount of washing the masses had to do.
- throwup238 1y ago
  > Spinning and weaving had always been done by a relatively small portion of society. This is very, very incorrect. Egregiously so. All evidence from antiquity to pre-modern Europe contradicts it. Up until the mechanization of textiles, spinning and weaving took up the majority of women’s work time. Even noblewomen were painted doing the act. Annual labor hours were comparable to unskilled men in agriculture, even after mechanical innovations. If you’d like I can give you academic citations but acoup.blog written by an actual historian just ran an entire series on this topic: https://acoup.blog/2025/09/26/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ivd-spinning-plates/ https://acoup.blog/2025/09/26/collections-life-work-death-an... Subsistence for a small family meant nearly 1800 hours a year of work on just textiles, accounting for a single woman’s labor over an entire year. That’s just 200 hours short of a modern 9-5 work year. On just textiles.

johnnyanmac 1y ago

>Put another way, "“One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static – they go up. It’s human nature. You cannot rest on your laurels in this world. Customers won’t have it.” -- one of Bezos's Amazon shareholder letters. Nowadays, the new strategy is "you will own nothing, have worse more expensive services, and like it". The mood has completely shifted as of late. It feels more like the shareholder's demands are never static.

Animats 1y ago

> Historically, technological revolutions have increased productivity and labor force participation, despite many pundits at the time worried about loss of jobs. That was basically true from about 1830, when railroads came out of beta, to 1979.[1][2] During that period, wages roughly tracked productivity. There are solid US stats on this from at least 1950. This has happened in other countries, too, but generally later than in the US. Here's a study from Japan.[3] In the UK, productivity and wages parted company around 2008.[4] There are stats for China, but they only go back to 1995 and aren't taken that seriously even in China. Plus, China now has 200 million gig workers (!)[5] and data collection on them is weak. Official workforce size in China peaked in 2015, which may indicate that many gig workers are not being counted. This needs to be looked at more closely. Productivity is going great, but the gains don't go to workers much. [1] https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ [2] https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2023/03/when-comparing-wages-and-worker-productivity-the-price-measure-matters/ https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2023/03/when-comparing-wages... [3] https://www.rieti.go.jp/en/publications/summary/25090019.html https://www.rieti.go.jp/en/publications/summary/25090019.htm... [4] https://fraserofallander.org/link-labour-productivity-wage-growth-uk/ https://fraserofallander.org/link-labour-productivity-wage-g... [5] https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/09/18/chinas-200m-gig-workers-are-a-warning-for-the-world https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/09/18/chinas-200m-gig...

anovikov 1y ago
That's not about wages, but labor force participation. What changed around 1979 was that workers who were freed up due to automation, were employed in lower paid service roles that's why wages stopped following productivity. But they weren't left unemployed - through 1970s unemployment was quite high by today's standards, we are living in times of longest ever sustained low unemployment.
- Animats 1y ago
  We're in sustained under-employment. About half of people in the US who have college degrees are working in jobs that don't need a degree. 70% of Uber drivers started driving after they lost a job. Unemployment of new college graduates has increased recently. This hit graduates of the computer boot camps a year or two ago, and this year it hit Berkeley CS graduates. Most people eventually find some kind of job. The alternative is being homeless.

tuatoru 1y ago

If AI takes a fraction α of jobs, for it to be employment increasing, elasticity of demand for labor needs to be 1/(1-α).

dfxm12 1y ago

You can't take these things in a vacuum. Labor has gotten weaker over time. AI just gives more power to employers. Take Klarna. They laid off 700 people, realized it was a mistake, but they are hiring people back as gig workers [0]. Not proper employees with a salary and benefits. The thing about the US in particular is that a job is not just a job. It's your social safety net, as too many welfare programs have onerous work requirements. Employers know this. They have way too much power, probably more than ever before in our lifetimes. AI gives them that much more power. 0 - https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/klarnas-ai-replaced-700-workers-now-the-fintech-ceo-wants-humans-back-after-40b-fall-11747573937564.html https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/klarnas-ai-replaced-...

pyuser583 1y ago
This is a relatively easy fix - separate benefits from specific jobs. There's a strong social element to jobs - it's not just money, it's your friends. But that's an easy fix too - forming social units not based on employers. Unions used to fill this role, as did guilds, and just plain clubs. These aren't huge problems.