Post
Topic
Board Economics
Re: Technological unemployment is (almost) here
by
Rassah
on 30/12/2013, 23:14:43 UTC
There's no transaition from one to the other. Otherwise we wouldn't still have agriculture and industry.
I never said previous sector being completely destroyed after each transition. Just number of employed people falls to insignificant numbers (e.g. there is still agriculture in the U.S., but it provides just 2% of jobs).

Agriculture used to be plowing, seeding, tilling, and picking. If you look at just that, then yeah, there's even less than 2% of that now. Almost no one does it anymore, since that is done with machines and tractors. But that's not what agriculture means anymore. Now agriculture includes land surveys, irrigation systems, chemical research for new types of fertilizers and pesticides, product delivery and storage systems and research, and an enormous amount of research into genetic and biological engineering to make the food cheaper to grow and more resistant to disease and insects. All those people who used to be employed to move dirt around by hand are now free to do much more advanced (and less labor-intensive) things, and as a result we are able to grow a lot more food with a lot fewer resources. And yes, food is cheaper now. The price might not have changed, or maybe even seemed to go up, but you're forgetting inflation.


But if you count number of job gains and losses EU-wide, you will see strongly negative number!

Of course. You will see the same thing in US if you look over the last decade. But if you look at the world as a whole, you see strongly positive number of new jobs (HUGELY strongly positive), which means, as I've said, that jobs are not disapearing, they are moving away to other developing countries.