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>Current rates of employment are well below historic levels. Ignoring for a second that net jobs and employment rates aren't really the same thing. >In preind

>Current rates of employment are well below historic levels. Ignoring for a second that net jobs and employment rates aren't really the same thing. >In preindustrial societies nearly everyone was working to support themselves and their families, these days a huge percentage of the population is in education which may be investing in their future but isn’t directly producing anything. Retirement as a percentage of the population similarly exploded etc. The first thing anyone does in employment statistics is remove non participants. Bringing them back in is weird. If you don't need or want a job its kind of a non sequitur to be lumped in with the employment seeking population. AI doomers aren't suggesting that its going to gainfully retire the population. >preindustrial societies Pre industrial societies can be loosely grouped into "People farming to make 3-5 times the food they need" and "city dwellers". Now that a single person can farm for 100s of people, we do have hundreds more city jobs going. We dont have a huge number of out of work farmers sitting around doing nothing. Likewise, Banks employ more people after introducing ATM's than before. Likewise cloud didnt leave IT people lining up at the dole office, but it just moved them from cleaning up on prem messes to cleaning up cloud messes and onprem messes.

nok22kon 4mo ago
> Likewise, Banks employ more people after introducing ATM's than before. that's a common trope, and its both true and false true: more bank employees after ATM's false: less bank employees after smartphone banking
- bigfatkitten 4mo ago
  The big 4 Australian banks (Commonwealth Bank, ANZ, National Australia Bank and Westpac) all employ pretty much the same number of people now as they did 25 years ago, but their workforce composition has changed. More software developers, fewer branch staff.
  - monjedetonsura 4mo ago
    ~20% outsorced workforce in places like India, Vietnam and Philipines nowadays
    - bigfatkitten 4mo ago
      I’m only counting the Australian FTE. The numbers are up if you count the outsourcing.
      - Retric 4mo ago
        The Australian population size isn’t pretty much the same as it was 25 years ago. 28 million in 2026 vs 18.8 million in 2001 is a ~50% jump… So no the numbers are down significantly even with outsourcing.
        protocolture 4mo ago
        I really hate the (very australian) propensity to take an argument about X, and make it about X as a proportion of Y, pretending they are exactly the same statistic. LNP: Taxes less. Labor: Taxes less (as a proportion of GDP) (Seeing as GDP includes government spending, it seems like you can make the rate of tax go down by increasing government spending by more than taxes increase) If a claim is about X, introducing another variable doesn't invalidate the claim about X.
        Retric 4mo ago
        In this case my original post that everyone was responding to here was talking about employment as a function of population as obviously a larger population needs more food etc. Ignoring that when the global population is likely to peak soon due to falling birth rates is a massive mistake. Jobs in a world of falling population and increasing automation is largely uncharted territory.
    - protocolture 4mo ago
      An outsourced job is still a job. Its just for the government to rebalance the economy if those jobs are desirable to reshore.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
Retric 4mo ago
> Banks employ more people after introducing ATM's than before. Not as a percentage of the population. In 1967 the US population in 1967 was 200 million today it’s 350 million. Globally the growth was even faster. Your farming productivity numbers are also very exaggerated. The actual percentage of the population was very high because of food spillage, and inconsistent productivity due to weather etc. They often needed ~90% of the adult population to be farmers or people starved, and famine was still common. Right before industrialization that number started to drop which is largely what caused industrialization. You got a positive feedback loop of increased productivity when a vastly larger percentage of the population could do something other than produce food.
- protocolture 4mo ago
  >Not as a percentage of the population. In 1967 the US population in 1967 was 200 million today it’s 350 million. Globally the growth was even faster. Didnt I address that explicitly?
  - Retric 4mo ago
    Not in your post, if you did you could quote an actual rebuttal that larger populations don’t inherently need more food, increase the need for banking services, etc etc. You also found it odd I didn’t “remove non participants” but preindustrial societies didn’t necessarily have formal jobs for people. You’ll note I didn’t exclude modern stay at home parents as non workers because labor is the metric not if you have formal employment.
    - protocolture 4mo ago
      >Ignoring for a second that net jobs and employment rates aren't really the same thing. Net Jobs can increase while their percentage of all jobs drops. These things aren't necessarily linked or related. There isnt really a built in expectation that banking for 10 million people needs 10 times less staff than banking for 100 million people.
      - 4mo ago

nok22kon 4mo ago

> Likewise, Banks employ more people after introducing ATM's than before. that's a common trope, and its both true and false true: more bank employees after ATM's false: less bank employees after smartphone banking

bigfatkitten 4mo ago
The big 4 Australian banks (Commonwealth Bank, ANZ, National Australia Bank and Westpac) all employ pretty much the same number of people now as they did 25 years ago, but their workforce composition has changed. More software developers, fewer branch staff.
- monjedetonsura 4mo ago
  ~20% outsorced workforce in places like India, Vietnam and Philipines nowadays
  - bigfatkitten 4mo ago
    I’m only counting the Australian FTE. The numbers are up if you count the outsourcing.
    - Retric 4mo ago
      The Australian population size isn’t pretty much the same as it was 25 years ago. 28 million in 2026 vs 18.8 million in 2001 is a ~50% jump… So no the numbers are down significantly even with outsourcing.
      - protocolture 4mo ago
        I really hate the (very australian) propensity to take an argument about X, and make it about X as a proportion of Y, pretending they are exactly the same statistic. LNP: Taxes less. Labor: Taxes less (as a proportion of GDP) (Seeing as GDP includes government spending, it seems like you can make the rate of tax go down by increasing government spending by more than taxes increase) If a claim is about X, introducing another variable doesn't invalidate the claim about X.
        Retric 4mo ago
        In this case my original post that everyone was responding to here was talking about employment as a function of population as obviously a larger population needs more food etc. Ignoring that when the global population is likely to peak soon due to falling birth rates is a massive mistake. Jobs in a world of falling population and increasing automation is largely uncharted territory.
  - protocolture 4mo ago
    An outsourced job is still a job. Its just for the government to rebalance the economy if those jobs are desirable to reshore.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]

Retric 4mo ago

> Banks employ more people after introducing ATM's than before. Not as a percentage of the population. In 1967 the US population in 1967 was 200 million today it’s 350 million. Globally the growth was even faster. Your farming productivity numbers are also very exaggerated. The actual percentage of the population was very high because of food spillage, and inconsistent productivity due to weather etc. They often needed ~90% of the adult population to be farmers or people starved, and famine was still common. Right before industrialization that number started to drop which is largely what caused industrialization. You got a positive feedback loop of increased productivity when a vastly larger percentage of the population could do something other than produce food.

protocolture 4mo ago
>Not as a percentage of the population. In 1967 the US population in 1967 was 200 million today it’s 350 million. Globally the growth was even faster. Didnt I address that explicitly?
- Retric 4mo ago
  Not in your post, if you did you could quote an actual rebuttal that larger populations don’t inherently need more food, increase the need for banking services, etc etc. You also found it odd I didn’t “remove non participants” but preindustrial societies didn’t necessarily have formal jobs for people. You’ll note I didn’t exclude modern stay at home parents as non workers because labor is the metric not if you have formal employment.
  - protocolture 4mo ago
    >Ignoring for a second that net jobs and employment rates aren't really the same thing. Net Jobs can increase while their percentage of all jobs drops. These things aren't necessarily linked or related. There isnt really a built in expectation that banking for 10 million people needs 10 times less staff than banking for 100 million people.
    - 4mo ago