> Saying that automation has not destroyed jobs is simply a lack of imagination on the part of these researchers.
I honestly burst out laughing at this, what do you think these researchers have failed to imagine? The idea of confining their view strictly to horse employment and not considering the employment as a whole? Researchers shouldn't be imaginative in how they approach experiments, they should be scientific and precise. If they don't like the results they get they shouldn't imagine new definitions of employment that justify their preconceived notions.
There is no such thing as a horse job. Horses are not people with legal rights. They are property, that was replaced as soon as a better machine came around.
Humans aren't horses. Horses can't buy an automobile or a computer. The number of registered automobiles has gone from 126 million in 1960 to over 1.2 billion in 2012, which is a 4X increase per capita. The number of people owning smartphones (a type of personal computer) has gone from 122 million in 2007 to 2.5 billion in 2017.
Of course there is. The occupation of ostler was once an important trade, it is no longer.
Horse jobs (horses are a special and strange kind of human) are nil. Before there were lots of jobs they could do, now there are no essential tasks.
Turnspit dog[0] jobs (another very strange kind of human) are nil, in fact they are so nil that the dogs went extinct. There were no tasks left for them to do, their jobs were automated away.
Jobs for very very intellectually slow people are nil or nearly nil. This was not true in say, 1600. In 1600 even the most dimwitted human could be helpful: At the very least he could do essential tasks like chop wood and carry water. Today there are zero essential tasks. If one has a job, it is usually because someone is humoring him or her, or that we as a society have just decided to be nice, economics of it be damned [1].
Very few humans under 10 in the united states have jobs. This was not always true. Very few humans over 80 have jobs. There are no essential tasks that we have for these classes of people, just like the horses and very slow people. (We could consider this a victory that there aren't any jobs for 10 year olds but that's beside the point here)
There are classes of humans already boxed out of any possible job in some economies. Gradations of humans must exist nearly all the way up the chain. Saying that automation has not destroyed jobs is simply a lack of imagination on the part of these researchers.
Maybe not all humans will be obsolete in the job market, but we already have to permit that some are.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnspit_dog
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwill_Industries