The industrial revolution was responsible for a greater increase in human wealth than almost any other even in human history. We are all tremendously better off getting to live after it instead of before it.

We’ve been working on self driving cars and drones for decades too. Maybe we’ll actually finish self driving cars. Maybe we won’t. If we do, that’s a lot of jobs lost.

But if you look at the overall stats, we are going in reverse on stability. More and more people are falling out of a middle class existence - will there be more jobs yes. Will there be as many, allowing a higher than subsistence living? That is very unclear even now before even more automation comes.

Um, no. This is wrong. Living standards around the world are improving like they never have in human history.

Or that you can store 64 GB of data on a card the size of a bottle cap.

What they care about is that rent in this city has gone up ~50% in the last six years, their incomes haven't, and they went from having a home, to wrapping themselves in dirty blankets, and sleeping by the garbage bins in the back alley.

Zoning reform will at best only make it cheaper for high earning single people and small families to find housing in dense cities 30 years after a reform is implemented. Where, the only real solution is figuring out a way that would allow us to build dense urban multifamily buildings at the same cost per square foot as single family homes.

Vacancy rates are higher then they've been since the recession... Yet rents are climbing 5-15% yoy.

I look out the window, and it's a panorama of construction cranes. There's more active cranes here, then there are in any other American city.

Oh, and my rent went up 17% last year.

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-ar...

Here is a very recent article:

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/amid-build...

I may not be representative, but the average rent dropping doesn't mean anything to someone renting a bottom 10%-cost unit.

Average rent may very well be dropping - but the average renter is not someone who lives right on the margin of having a home, and sleeping on a park bench.

It'll happen though if current building trends continue.

In a relatively developed area (e.g. the US and many first world nations), it is failing. In the US for example, life expectancy has dropped three years running. More and more people fall to a median income that doesn't even let them have kids and send them to college, and seems to be falling to where they can't even pay for minor emergencies. That's not improvement.

Largely due to obesity and related diseases. People are dying from overabundance. The percentage of people at "subsistence" levels is quite low.

> More and more people fall to a median income that doesn't even let them have kids and send them to college, and seems to be falling to where they can't even pay for minor emergencies. That's not improvement.

Is this at all true? Paying for your kids' college simply wasn't something most people did even 30 years ago, because most kids didn't go to college.

No, the decline is due primarily to drug overdoses, and that mainly from the opioid epidemic.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/28/us-life-expectancy-drops-as-...

I'd bet money that US life expectancy in 2023 is hither than it was in 2018.

That time is now.

Where do you come up with this racist crap? As someone who grew up in a poor white area in the North of the US I can assure you that race has absolutely nothing to do with lack of low-paying jobs concern.

>Of course, there is no reason why these people should make close to nothing while other people throughout the economy have bullshit jobs that pay really well.

Supply and demand. It's economics 101. It's like claiming that there is no reason people should be paying over a thousand dollars for an ounce of gold when copper is only a couple of dollars a pound.

If the people with low paying jobs were qualified to do the higher paying job, the employer would happily hire them for a lower price to save money.

This is especially true because if you don't work, you'll almost certainly be homeless, hungry, ect so the entire premise of there being a fair market for labor is false.