I don't think this takes into account rising productivity of labor. Sure, people can't eat dollars but dollars still represent value.

Yes I think it is ironic if people are worried about both technological unemployment and a scarcity of labor.

It’s still possible for it to be a problem. Human skills aren’t entirely fungible. If technological disruption continues to increase in pace then we may reach a point where people’s education becomes obsolete before they even finish their degrees.

We could see large scale technological unemployment despite a shortage of labour in a set of ever-changing, highly specialized fields that people only end up in by an extremely lucky guess at the time they declare a major.

I am struggling to think of any part of my formal education, some of which occurred more than 20 years ago, which has been rendered obsolete by technical disruption. I don’t think technology is changing society that quickly.

It takes a whole different kind of reasoning to ponder the big picture. I'm not sure if anyone can do it. All I have is the clue that thinking from your own perspective never works. You get something like: I have money and kids, inheritance tax is bad. I lack money, the tax is good.

But to answer your question: Technical "disruption" is every instance of a thing making your job easier. It will require less skill/training and come with lower pay. Jobs with few, sometimes hard, decisions will benefit from technology. At some point the hard stuff is gone.

Perhaps your job was affected 0.1% in the last decade and the average is 5%. It would be just like 1 in 20 "jobs" vanished without anyone noticing it.

Dollars are how we account for net value provided, and their only value is in society’s collective agreement that tangible goods and services person A provided to B yesterday can be balanced by unlike goods and services A received from C today. They’re literally the debt that society owes the holder to compensate for past services to the society.

It’s not the only system of distributing goods and services to the populace. In theory, a centralized authority could evaluate everyone’s current need and provide it to them directly. This has gone disastrously wrong whenever it’s been tried in practice, though.

Dollars are just a mechanism for transferring wealth. Wealth is stuff, both in the here and now - land and assets - and in the future - wealth-generating machines like people and corporations.

There is no lack of food in the world; there might be a lack of beef, but not everyone needs to get to eat beef. There is no lack of land; there is more than enough land for everyone; it's just scarce in places that have high demand. The problem is distribution.

> There is no lack of food in the world; there might be a lack of beef, but not everyone needs to get to eat beef. There is no lack of land; there is more than enough land for everyone; it's just scarce in places that have high demand. The problem is distribution.

Legitimately baffled to see so many people in this thread asserting that this is not the case.

Also there will never be a lack of beef. This is economics 101 that people have a problem grasping. As the price of beef (or anything) goes up, this is a signal to entrepreneurs to make more of it, until the price goes down again. This is why prices are so important - higher prices lead to more supply, bringing prices down. Thus as demand for beef worldwide increases, producers will supply more of it to meet demand.

Production doesn't always increase as quickly or easily as economics 101 would have you believe. When there is a severe drought, there can be talk about towing icebergs but somehow it doesn't happen. Instead, people cut back on water usage.

You need to look into how production is actually done in each market to understand how quickly producers can respond to changes in demand.

(I'm not going to worry about beef, though, since there are good substitutes.)

I think that food is less of an issue since there is plenty of food other than beef that most people like.

However, although land itself may not be limited in the near term, land that people want is limited. Even if you have the same number of acres of land as the previous generation, if that land is less valuable, then your wealth and quality of life have gone down.