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As long as human beings are able to produce anything of value, jobs won't go away, and why would that ever stop being the case? There is a plenty of work to be

by xixi77 13y ago

As long as human beings are able to produce anything of value, jobs won't go away, and why would that ever stop being the case? There is a plenty of work to be done: take, e.g., personal help industry as an example of a field that used to be huge until very recently everywhere, is still huge around the world, but is so far a source of fairly little employment in US/Europe.

SideburnsOfDoom 13y ago
> As long as human beings are able to produce anything of value, jobs won't go away, and why would that ever stop being the case? That's not a proof. That is the "surely" argument https://medium.com/science-and-technology/83dacb1fe14c https://medium.com/science-and-technology/83dacb1fe14c It's possible that this is the case, but I'm very sceptical of it. It produces some absurd results eventually: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/can-economic-growth-last/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/can-economic-gro... Another trusim from economics: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop"
- xixi77 13y ago
  But, I am not actually appealing to common sense here -- that would make me no better than the "no infinite growth in finite world" people. So, are you suggesting that people will no longer be able to be of any value to others at some point in the future? Or that, despite them being able to produce such value, there would be no demand for their time? Why? I've seen that link btw. For some reason people in physics are particularly susceptible to thinking that they can understand economics better than economists do. They are quite wrong about that :)
- xixi77 13y ago
  (was thinking of this as I was driving this morning) -- actually all the argumentation in that article, iirc, is essentially an inverted pyramid that all rests on one point: "there is a natural limit on the ratio of the $$ value of food production to that of the rest of the economy". This is clearly a "surely" argument (it is not being supported by anything other than his intuition), and a pretty bad one at that -- for example, we've seen agricultural employment collapse from ~90% to ~2% of the population, and the process continues, despite farming subsidies and other conscious attempts to slow it down.

by xixi77 13y ago

SideburnsOfDoom 13y ago

> As long as human beings are able to produce anything of value, jobs won't go away, and why would that ever stop being the case? That's not a proof. That is the "surely" argument https://medium.com/science-and-technology/83dacb1fe14c https://medium.com/science-and-technology/83dacb1fe14c It's possible that this is the case, but I'm very sceptical of it. It produces some absurd results eventually: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/can-economic-growth-last/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/can-economic-gro... Another trusim from economics: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop"

xixi77 13y ago
But, I am not actually appealing to common sense here -- that would make me no better than the "no infinite growth in finite world" people. So, are you suggesting that people will no longer be able to be of any value to others at some point in the future? Or that, despite them being able to produce such value, there would be no demand for their time? Why? I've seen that link btw. For some reason people in physics are particularly susceptible to thinking that they can understand economics better than economists do. They are quite wrong about that :)
xixi77 13y ago
(was thinking of this as I was driving this morning) -- actually all the argumentation in that article, iirc, is essentially an inverted pyramid that all rests on one point: "there is a natural limit on the ratio of the $$ value of food production to that of the rest of the economy". This is clearly a "surely" argument (it is not being supported by anything other than his intuition), and a pretty bad one at that -- for example, we've seen agricultural employment collapse from ~90% to ~2% of the population, and the process continues, despite farming subsidies and other conscious attempts to slow it down.