Why Is It Bad for Tech to Eat Jobs?
19th November 2014
Most jobs suck. Yours probably doesn’t–after all, you’re a member of the highly educated, cutting-edge TechCrunch demographic–but most jobs, almost by definition, are done by people coerced by the fear of not having enough money into doing work they mostly don’t want to do. We should be ecstatic about the prospect of robots doing that work for us. Shouldn’t we?
Nobody cares whether tech ‘eats jobs’ — what they care about is tech ‘eating incomes’, which said jobs provide.
Suppose self-driving trucks let us do all that work with 3 million fewer people, while creating 2 million better jobs with twice the salary elsewhere. How have we painted ourselves into a corner where that is somehow viewed as a bad thing? Why are we so scared of a future that boasts both greater economic production, and more people with the freedom to spend their time and effort however they desire? Shouldn’t a world with more output from fewer jobs (defined as “paying people to do things they don’t really want to do”) actually be extremely desirable?
Easy to see the three million eliminated jobs, easy to wave the hands about two million better jobs with twice the salary elsewhere; we people on the reality side of the aisle want some specifics behind that handwaving. Saying ‘here a miracle occurs’ is not sufficient.
Put another way: why would it still be important to maintain full employment in a world overflowing with machine-generated wealth available to everyone?
But it’s not ‘available to everyone’, outside of the Aggregation fallacy. Wealth doesn’t accrue to ‘everyone’ (except in socialist dreamworlds, and we’ve seen how well those work out), but to people who have a claim on that wealth through some market mechanism. This focus on distribution (for which I blame the fact that everybody reads Rawls in college) only deals with half of the question; what about production, and the claims on wealth that participating in production produces in all free societies?
The writer, of course, being a good Voice of the Crust, sees it as a Problem For Government; I blame the current media for allowing people like this to write about economic problems without bothering to learn something about economics first.