You could make a fairly strong argument that is was the very real threat of Communist revolution in Western Europe (e.g. Germany in the 1930s, or Italy and France post-WW2) that forced governments to adopt socialist programs that moderated many of the excesses of the market, or in the US, the massive government investment in the middle class as well as draconian anti-left measures that prevented a similar threat.
We've so far ended up in a somewhat decent place, but if history is any measure, we're going to have a rocky next few decades if technology does end up destroying or transforming demand for labor. People generally don't go quietly when their livelihoods or place in the social order are threatened.
> "In managing the earth, vegetation and animals, the first priority of medieval men and women was to produce food, but they also expected to receive the benefits of their work in the foreseeable future, so the practised (to use the modern term) 'sustainable' agriculture. They planned for the same land to yield crops regularly, and the appreciated that well-managed resources renewed themselves. They anticipated the changeability of the seasons and the harvests, and hoped that their farming methods would allow them to survive in a year of unusual weather, for example by planting a variety of crops. At no time or place within our period can they be described as 'subsistence farmers' [emphasis added], in the sense that they ate only food that they had grown, or that they produced solely for their own consumption needs. They always expected that their land would yield a surplus, whether for the benefit of the state, the church or their lords, or for exchange for goods and services which they could not obtain from their own land.
Now, I'm not going to pretend that the industrial revolution was obviously bad for most people, but to say it was obviously good is wrong too. It's a complex thing, and it's not clear whether people are happier or even healthier in an industrial economy than an agrarian one.
Plague, famine, et al, sure sounds happier and healthier than compared to modern (First World) living.
Even if you look back at hunter-gatherer societies where it's been claimed that leisure time was substantially greater than today, things like infant mortality make that seem like hell.
I take these type of historical deconstructions with a large grain of salt; it used to be the idea of the Noble Savage, now it's moving on to medieval times.
Those changes in infant mortality, for example, are largely due to better hygiene around births and in handling infants. Wash your hands and boil your water; you can still be in an agrarian economy and do this.
A society which knows about warp travel, but has chosen to live an agrarian lifestyle again, while keeping their technological knowledge.
I think it comes from a pretty triumphalist view of the last 300 years rather than any real history. So basically: I agree.
Nobody had modern medicine or electricity that far back anyway.
By now there's no reason for anyone urban or rural to do without medicine or electricity unless their society is consuming more than it produces, or is handling surplus in unbalanced ways.
Maybe paradise would be more within reach if those little problems could be overcome.
>The free market isn't some singular entity that figures out problems before they arrive and sends us all an executive summary of its plan.
Obviously, which is why I think it's a good idea to have a few regulations in place so that we, as a society, might figure out our plan and how to make the transition a little less painful for those who have to suffer the consequences. Not that you argued against regulations in the first place but from your comments I assumed you and pm90 were of the libertarian kind.
I'll repeat the point: We have 250 years of experience of jobs disappearing to automation.
The counterintuitive result is an enormously increased living standard for regular people. It's hard to compute by how much, but economists who try come up with a factor of 20x to 30x.
I don't think modern society is in any way ready to reoptimize for the accelerating displacement that robotics and ai bring.
It's not the same thing, and we aren't ready for it, partly just because people don't recognize the difference between the two.
That era has lifted the greatest number of people out of poverty in history. Employment and income keeps going normally.
I agree that it's possible that this trend will break. But be aware that all through these 250 years, people have constantly predicted this, and always had plausible arguments for why "this time it's different".
Wait till the software engineering jobs are automated away.
A lot of that wealth was obtained by unsustainably extracting our planet's natural resources. The past 100 years have been good, relatively speaking, but we did it in part by mortgaging our descendents' futures for many generations to come.
To alleviate the pain of the transition, sometimes we need to slow it down. The tough part is figuring out how much drag to apply so that it slows but doesn't halt.
There was a graph not to long ago that showed the most common job in each state. In a huge swath of them, that job was "Truck Driver". What're those people going to do to put food on the table or a roof over their family's head when those jobs are automated away?
Now, I'm not some heartless jerk who doesn't recognize that the short-term effects of job loss on unskilled workers. It is certainly a hard problem, but I'm still not convinced that we will have some epic labor shortage because all unskilled jobs will vanish too quickly.
And while labor-saving tech is, overall a good thing, there are lots of people still counting on those mundane jobs to put food on the table. And so far, no one is willing to think of what happens to them, or prepare for when those jobs go away. And if we don't do that, if we rely on "the market" to do the right thing, we will see that epic labor shortage which leads to the dystopian future.
Today growth is very anemic owing to market saturation and declining birth rates.
That was bogus, it had to do with the fact that "Truck Driver" didn't have fine-grained sub-classification in the taxonomy, while jobs like "teacher" did.
The average 55 year old has nothing to fear from semi-autonomous vehicle technology affecting their careers
To say this is because of the free market, when most technology development is heavily government funded, even in the USA is just plain wrong.
Interesting, I think the entire industrial revolution is a very strong counter example to that statement. We repeatedly automated the majority of jobs on the planet every few decades and we saw the largest expansion of wealth and prosperity for the majority of humans in all of history. Should we lament over those subsistence farming jobs that were automated away?
The free market isn't some singular entity that figures out problems before they arrive and sends us all an executive summary of its plan. We currently don't have mass unemployment from automation, and I don't agree with many of the reasons people express for worrying. The only arguments I've seen against mass automation are hints of some dystopian future where somehow robots are prohibitively expensive for all but the richest people, and goods will somehow be cheap enough from automation that non-automated manufacturing can't compete, but still expensive enough that if we don't work 40 hours a week we'll starve.