But it's hard to say to workers who've spent their entire lives developing skills particular to an industry that they should just go and find a job in an indust

But it's hard to say to workers who've spent their entire lives developing skills particular to an industry that they should just go and find a job in an industry that needs more workers. Retraining is hard. Relocating is hard. People are a lot less mobile than capital. Is this a worthwhile justification to keep investing in the old industry at the expense of the new? It is hard to say people need to go learn new skills, but it is harder for me to say that the main reason we aren't adopting something new is because the long-term benefits of adoption are outweighed by the relatively short-term pain of a group of displaced laborers. The people who experience the short-term pain may themselves benefit from this new technology being adopted. I get the sense a part of this is due to the sentiment that I've noticed that employers owe continuing retention to their employees. It is why layoffs carry such a social stigma. It created this sense the people should not have to retrain, and that they should not have to relocate. At the extreme, they shouldn't even have to change employers to do the same task. It would suck for me to have to do the same. I see it as a risk of living in an economy based on always pushing technology forward, which is what capitalism will tend to do. I've realized that no one else is responsible for making my life easier, whatever the expense. There is also this sentiment that skills do not cross-pollinate at all, and that current skills are all that matter. This is perhaps a broken bias on the part of the employer that skill set X now matters more than the ability to learn skill set Y,Z quickly in the future. This may be a product of thinking of oneself as an "X specialist" foremost, rather than identifying what conceptual basis one draws on to become an "X specialist". As for tearing down immigration laws, that only solves part of the problem. You still have to train someone, picking from a pool of people who have not been trained in the industry that came before will be just as hard, if not harder, because they don't have the prior skills to draw connections from.