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I often discuss this with friends. It often comes down to: Big technology disruptions have happened before. The market adjusted and something new came along fo

• SoftwareMaven 14y ago
  Except when a horse became a cost instead of providing income, it would likely have been slaughtered. I don't think that's the path we want to take with people.
  • mbetter 14y ago
    Based on the glee that a significant proportion of Americans seem to derive from cutting social safety nets, that appears to be exactly the path we seem to be heading down.
    • pc86 14y ago
      Yeah those stupid Americans sure do hate poor people, don't they? /s
      • niels_olson 14y ago
        Perhaps you haven't been to the South? Even the poor people hate the poor people. And they have the most poor people. Figure that.
        • mncolinlee 14y ago
          This is too true. Here in Minnesota, we had a state representative equate food stamp recipients to animals in two separate speeches. In her rural district, almost twenty percent are on welfare programs and most residents are under the poverty line and qualify for food stamps. They still vote for her in spite of statewide coverage of her statements. The attitude that everyone else is lazy and abusing the system seems most common in poor rural regions that depend the most on benefits. It usually has racial, anti-urban overtones that imply "we're only suffering because of THOSE people who don't look like us." It's a form of scapegoating.
          • RougeFemme 14y ago
            Agreed. And the people receiving disability don't recognize it as the entitlement program that is.
            • MartinCron 14y ago
              Most beneficiaries of entitlement programs don't recognize them as such.
              • clarkevans 14y ago
                Perhaps those who are receiving entitlement (and advocating for its abolition), may be using reasoning that you don't recognize. For example, could some of these recipients be very guilty about their use, and, are voting to end them because they don't see any other way out for themselves? Accepting a free handout is a very hard thing in our culture, especially for those that know the gift they receive was forcibly taken from others.
          • jiggy2011 14y ago
            That's an interesting point and I notice similar behaviour in the UK. People will talk up a politician who promises to "end the benefits culture" despite being on benefits themselves. The reasoning is usually along the lines of "oh he's just talking about those other people on benefits who don't deserve them. Not good hard-nonworking folks like us"
          • scarmig 14y ago
            That's a bit of an incomplete description you give, though. Poorer regions that more benefits do tend to vote for people to cut those benefits. But as Andrew Gelman has demonstrated, it's not really the people getting the benefits who want to cut them: it's the professional and ruling class in the area who do. Nearly everywhere the lower classes do want more benefits, but the big difference between regions is what the powerful people want.
        • twinge 14y ago
          One possible explanation is "last place aversion": http://www.nber.org/papers/w17234 http://www.nber.org/papers/w17234 > Why do low-income individuals often oppose redistribution? We hypothesize that an aversion to being in "last place" undercuts support for redistribution, with low-income individuals punishing those slightly below themselves to keep someone "beneath" them. In laboratory experiments, we find support for "last-place aversion" in the contexts of risk aversion and redistributive preferences. Participants choose gambles with the potential to move them out of last place that they reject when randomly placed in other parts of the distribution. Similarly, in money- transfer games, those randomly placed in second-to-last place are the least likely to costlessly give money to the player one rank below. Last-place aversion predicts that those earning just above the minimum wage will be most likely to oppose minimum-wage increases as they would no longer have a lower-wage group beneath them, a prediction we confirm using survey data.
          • niels_olson 14y ago
            Wow. That's exactly it. Having spent most of my adult life below the Mason-Dixon line, that is exactly it. That and the comments noting that people receiving a benefit fail to recognize that program as an entitlement program. We need some serious educational reform . . .
      • anigbrowl 14y ago
        There was an article in the WSJ yesterday about a lawsuit over making websites more accessible to people with disabilities: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324373204578374483679498140.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732437320457837... Take a glance at the comments - apart from the usual anti-lawyer screeds, the other main theme is that it'll be way too expensive and they're not worth it. There are some impressively nasty opinions, and a regrettably large number of people who think that way.
      • eli_gottlieb 14y ago
        Yes, yes they do. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bg7kgO7lFA4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bg7kgO7lFA4
  • nollidge 14y ago
    Add to that the fact that we can control domestic horse breeding, whereas controlling human breeding is, you know, frowned upon.
    • benologist 14y ago
      Is it? Contraceptives and to some extent education are pretty normal in a lot of societies. There's no stigma involved in buying or using condoms or other means of avoiding pregnancy, although there is with abortion.
      • wonderzombie 14y ago
        The OP means such as forced sterilization. There's precedent for it, and it's widely (and IMHO correctly) regarded as monstrous.
        • pyre 14y ago
          Or "one child" policies.
    • davidroberts 14y ago
      Birth rates tend to stabilize in first world countries anyway. The only reason that isn't happening in the US is immigration--legal and otherwise. In Japan, the population is decreasing. In Europe, it's near zero growth in many countries.
      • nitrogen 14y ago
        This isn't the only reason; some subcultures in the US continue to encourage large families.
        • dripton 14y ago
          Some people do have a lot of kids. However, the overall total fertility rate in the US was estimated in 2011 at 1.89 kids/woman, below replacement level. So without immigration, population would indeed be shrinking.
  • pekk 14y ago
    You don't have to slaughter them, just let them die on their own accord
  • niels_olson 14y ago
    Perhaps you would like Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal? http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html
• Locke1689 14y ago
  The issue I have with this is that technology disruptions came in the form of moving manual labor from farms to factories. The service wave of disruptions moved manual labor to communications labor. This wave of disruption is moving both of these to intellectual labor. Do I think that we have vast resources of unexploited intellectual labor? Yes. The issue is that the more people I meet the more I begin to believe the key to intellectual success is intellectual culture. Unfortunately, I don't think we have a very intellectual culture and culture changes slowly -- far slower than technology.
  • davidroberts 14y ago
    And not everyone is able to or desires to provide intellectual labor even if given the opportunity.
  • flatline 14y ago
    Not only is the culture of anti-intellectualism to blame, but so is the prevailing culture of intellectualism. It is hardly feasible for the majority of the workforce to get a PhD or even a Masters, which is still the cultural baseline for work in many intellectual fields. With the rising costs of education, even a BS is out of the question for many people, and it is not even an appropriate choice for many who would otherwise be inclined to intellectual work. Until we have widespread acceptance and a proven track record for more non-traditional forms of education, the rest of the cultural change you describe will be stagnant at best.
    • katbyte 14y ago
      Or if the costs of education in the US were brought down and/or subsidies by the government as they are in other countries (or even paid outright like some European countries)
      • markshead 14y ago
        The cost of getting an education in the US is minimal or nothing. The cost of getting a degree from many schools is very high. However, there are still small universities where you can graduate debt free even with a minimum wage job.
• datasage 14y ago
  Previous technology based labor disruptions have been countered largely by economic expansions. At least until recently economic expansion required labor. If a new technology put people out of work, there was another growing area to get work in. But we have kind of hit a tipping point though. Both in technology getting more efficient at automating even difficult work. As well as economic growth at least domestically is no longer as strong as it has been in the past.
  • gsmaverick 14y ago
    Every time these disruptions happen people said we had hit a tipping point and it was going to be different this time. Not sure how this time is different.
    • Afforess 14y ago
      Look out the window. Dow at a record high. Unemployment in recession territory. Labor demand and economic growth are decoupled.
      • YokoZar 14y ago
        The stock market is not economic growth. A far simpler explanation is that investors simply expect things like the labor market to recover, which is exactly why the markets react dramatically when the monthly jobs numbers are released.
  • YokoZar 14y ago
    Those historical economic expansions occurred precisely because of those labor saving technologies. It was not mere coincidence.
• scotty79 14y ago
  So you're saying that rapid raise of number of people that can't do anything valuable enough for any employer will never happen? Or that it's not just yet because it wasn't just yet the last time?
• tomjen3 14y ago
  Ah, but horses could provide only one thing: muscle power. Humans can do so many, many things that if one is undervalued, they will look at others. Some maybe we should stop saying that we are factory workers and must stay factory workers -- it just doesn't work that way, and truly never has.
  • jjoonathan 14y ago
    Horses are able to provide more than muscle power! They can tread over ground unsuited to the most primitive vehicles. They can fit in narrow spaces, they don't require petroleum, and they have enough intelligence to avoid certain kinds of absentminded user error. They are animals and they have personalities that machines will never have. Surely someone could find new uses for old horses, after all they are organic and adaptable in a way that machines aren't. And somebody did find new jobs for those horses! 2% of them, at least. The balance got slaughtered. You can wave your hands and argue that the jobs are out there or will appear given sufficient creativity, but the market simply doesn't care about the faith you have placed in it. Your optimism doesn't control the unemployment level. We have to prepare for the eventuality that the jobs don't materialize, and we have to do it in a way that doesn't heap perverse incentives onto the unemployed while choking off the very consumption that fuels the economy in the first place.
    • Someone 14y ago
      "And somebody did find new jobs for those horses! 2% of them, at least. The balance got slaughtered." I do not think this was as much of a slaughterhouse as that makes it look. Today, horses typically live for 20-30 years or so. In 1900, I would think working horses would be lucky to reach 20 years; as they became older and less productive, they would be sold of and slaughtered. With an average 'working career' of 10-15 years or a horse, just stopping buying replacement horses would be enough for most of that decline in the number of working horses.
      • justincormack 14y ago
        No. Just look at the horsemeat scandal. Large numbers of horses were being slaughtered in Romania and Ireland for economic reasons and are being eaten. They cost a lot to feed.
• scarmig 14y ago
  I've been using the exact same analogy for awhile! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4912914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4912914 I'm trying to figure out where I got it from--do you happen to know its provenance?
• Androsynth 14y ago
  I hope thats not some dystopian sales pitch for Soylent Glue.
• munificent 14y ago
  > There were about one million working horses in the UK in 1900 but only 20k by 1914. No one found new jobs for those horses... That's because most of them were killed on the battlefields of WWI. Here's the source of that part of the Wikipedia article: The war used horses in great numbers for non-cavalry purposes. It is estimated that some six million horses served and substantial numbers of these were killed. By 1914, the British had only 20,000 horses and the United States was called upon to supply the allied forces with remounts. In the four years of the war, the United States exported nearly a million horses to Europe. This seriously depleted the number of horses in America. When the American Expeditionary Force entered the war, it took with it an additional 182,000 horses. Of these, 60,000 were killed and only a scant 200 were returned to the United States. [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20110716085011/http://imh.org/legacy-of-the-horse/the-horse-in-world-war-i-1914-1918/ http://web.archive.org/web/20110716085011/http://imh.org/leg...
  • vacri 14y ago
    Most of them were killed on the battlefields in the first half-year of the war? Surely this 'slaughter of 980k horses' in a mere 5 months would more prominently noted in our history books?
    • RockyMcNuts 14y ago
      Indeed, WWI didn't start til August 1914... seems unlikely most of the 980K were killed in the war, more likely attrition/glue factory as they were replaced by cars/tractors.
      • mr_luc 14y ago
        Why does that seem unlikely? I just read Storm of Steel -- which is, by the way, The Best First-hand Account of World War One -- and it does seem like you can't go two pages without running into a dead horse. And from a numbers standpoint, if 6 million died in a 4-year war, it doesn't seem far-fetched that 980k would be killed in 6 months, especially since for an appreciable chunk of the war the Germans hunkered down behind the Siegfried line to conserve forces for a 2-front war.
• wyager 14y ago
  There is some strange mental block that makes it difficult for people to understand that technological progress does not and will not result in mass unemployment. Here's a clearer example with humans instead of horses: 200 years ago, Shoemaking was one of the world's largest industries. Today, it represents a very small fraction of the world economy and almost all shoemakers have been replaced by machines. What happened? As shoemaking machines became commonplace, shoemakers were suddenly unable to compete. Some of them found other jobs, some of them became destitute. Most were probably able to keep shoemaking until they retired, as the shoemaking machines took a while to roll out. However, the Shoemakers' children and other children in that generation were perfectly aware that shoemaking was no longer a viable industry. No one born after the popularization of shoemaking machines studied to become a shoemaker. What is the result? First, we now have less expensive, higher-quality shoes. This is not always an effect of mechanization, but it usually is. Second, we don't have mass unemployment. Why do we not have mass unemployment? Because when you replace workers with less expensive machines, one of two things happen; either the factory owner makes more money, or shoes start to cost less. If the factory owner makes more money, they spend it on a yacht or something. If the shoes cost less, the consumers have more money to spend on food or books or whatever. So, there are now very few people employed in the shoemaking industry, but all the shoemakers' children can now go into the expanding yacht-making or food-cooking or book-printing industries. Recap: Mechanization does not cause long-term unemployment. At worst, it causes unemployment for a single generation of workers. Ultimately, decreasing costs in one industry contribute to the growth of other industries (either via increased profits for the wealthy or decreased costs for the non-wealthy), so there is not a significant net change in employment.
  • anatari 14y ago
    It's not a mental block, it's because it is plausible. Just because it hasn't happened yet, doesn't mean it won't happen. In the extreme scenario, if technology advances to the point where it does nearly everything better than humans for practical necessities, it is unknown how much that will affect employment and society as we know it. In my mind, it's not a matter of if it will happen, but how far away we are from that reality. We could be 100 years away or 1000 years away and that's where the more interesting argument lies.
• smsm42 14y ago
  One more data point - whaling industry was once fifth largest industry in the US and employed 1% of all workforce (auto industry, for comparison, employs about 0.5% of workforce, 1% would be around 1.5 mln jobs). Could you imagine fifth largest industry now almost completely disappearing? They probably couldn't either.
• stinkytaco 14y ago
  Though the market adjusted, it does not always adjust in an optimal manner. With the increase in automation we've seen a shift into service jobs. These jobs are low income, low skill and often do not provide a living wage. They also don't actually increase wealth or create any real, long lasting value. This creates an income gap, which is what we're dealing with now. The primary means of generating wealth has shifted to controlling capital from adding value, and that's not a good thing either. Those horses died off, we can't count on people to do the same.
• igorlev 14y ago
  You are correct. The something new, at this point, is going on disability and waiting it out until they get Social Security payments. Most 50-year-olds with a high school education will not be becoming coders. If we are lucky, their kids are already working office jobs or have enough education/knowledge to do so. As a country and society we will of course find new things to do, hopefully even replacing our manufacturing loss with even better technologies and methods. However, we will always have a huge discontinuity produced by globalization and automation that abandoned a significant portion of the population without the skills or the hope to catch on to the new fields.