(b) In the future, there will be more humans than jobs anyways thanks to automation and this is a problem we are going to have to face one way or another. Social contract will change, and the economy will need to be refactored commensurately.
They're not "things" that exist in a limited supply.
You can think of them as relationships between people.
When population increases, no one worries that society will "run out" of friendships or marriages. Jobs work the same way.
They do exist in a limited supply. When a factory closes down and outsources all the jobs in a town, your job goes away.
When a robot starts doing your job, you are not needed anymore for that job. People in ivory towers expect that you should easily retrain and find new jobs that does not happen for the average joe.
When an immigrant is willing to do your job for less money or less safety, you dont get that job unless you are willing to compromise.
Now with all this you are going to have older people not retire then you are reducing the job pool for younger folks.
> Jobs work the same way.
In reality smart politicians can tap into the fear and frustration of average folks when good paying jobs run out and they promise they will bring back jobs, so voters vote for them.
I should have said "fixed number".
The US population is now twice as big as 1955. If the number of jobs had stayed fixed since then, unemployment would now be at least 50%.
This is clearly not true, which disproves the "fixed number of jobs" theory.
Not sure why you are disproving your own theory.
Perhaps you just missed the point I am trying to make.
A-Females are willing to marry B-Males, but B-Females are not willing to marry A-Males. This creates lots of abundance for B-Males and lots of scarcity for A-Makes.
As for jobs, in theory they can always be created a new. But in practice there are 1) very few people who can create jobs 2) external forces that might prevent new jobs from being created
My point is only that if the population increases, that percentage will stay the same. The number of marriages will increase proportionally.
> in practice there are 1) very few people who can create jobs 2) external forces that might prevent new jobs from being created
If that's true where do all the current jobs come from? How come almost everyone can get a job?
And they're going away anyway soon enough, as automation develops.
Seriously though, the majority of humans never see material upward mobility in their lifetimes, and a world without mandatory low-wage jobs per se isn't necessarily a world without upward mobility.
As humans are able to automate activities that span the creation of everything we find valuable, from resource collection to manufacture to transportation to design to art, that necessarily limits the economic efficiency of using humans for labor. The last 3 years have demonstrated that creative tasks are highly susceptible to automation, with most artistic automation approaching or exceeding human performance as proofs of concept. The next decades will see an ever decreasing landscape of activities where humans are more effective than software.
Jobs are endeavors defined around the exchange of money for labor. It does not make sense to pay more money for less effective labor - i.e. if I can pay $30k usd for a burger flipper robot, I won't have to pay for 2 full time burger flipper jobs. It makes no sense to hire people for labor that can be automated.
We're a long ways away from being able to automate everything, but the trend is clear. Jobs don't make sense under our current technological path. We either have to eliminate progress in that direction and artificially enforce a human preference job efficiency limit so as to maintain a "sufficient" number of jobs, or start exploring new economic models that let us transition to post-scarcity economics.
We are, however, going to see a time where anything humans can do, machines will do better. Using humans will be inefficient, and companies will be out competed if they don't automate. We can either prepare for that and try to make things fair, or assume new jobs will arise that will make meaningful enterprises available to people through innovation and novel opportunities that haven't yet been conceived. It seems clear to me that the latter is basically invention of make work, and we need to prepare for post scarcity.
We don't need agi. We have Moore's law and "good enough" algorithms to achieve human parity performance. We should figure out a better measure of the value of human time than jobs and employment.
Walter Reuther: Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?
So less jobs for young people.