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this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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Technology
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Economics say that technological advances hurt those displaced for a short period of time but the entire rest of the economy improves and the displaced people are smart enough to find other jobs in the new economy with higher standard of living...
Unless the value created never makes it back to the economy...
Basically, this argument is "yes the rich get richer, but the poor also appear better off so it's actually a good thing." Of course, it's confusing a correlation with a causation.
The reason the poor are better off isn't because the rich got richer -- it is because society stepped in, insisted on pro-social policies to lift up the poor like public schools, minimum wage, social safety nets, worker rights, equal protection under the law, and all manner of things.
The Luddites have over and over again been proved right by history. When machines take over, the machine owners benefit and the workers are hurt. When the workers are being crushed under heel, they are more likely to show solidarity and form social movements that force society to give back more, and thus they are lifted up. The idea that the automation itself is CAUSING that lifting up is a fallacy of broken windows.
It's flatly obnoxious that anyone is claiming that the rich are the reason the workers are better off when really the WORKERS are why the workers are better off and the rich are, at best, neutral bystanders except when they directly block the path of progress.
The argument in favor of the creative destruction of capitalism is used to thought-kill anyone advocating for social reform. Workers speak out that they are being hurt by a new technology and need support and instead of hearing the pain and considering what support would be fair, they're instead painted as being anti-progress and told they should just lay down and get run over because the overall economy will still be fine in the end (and who cares if a few people are flattened in the process).
Stopping tech from taking jobs just doesn't make any sense. If we did have the perfect economic system, having that tech would lower the overall amount of work that needs to be done. That is a good thing. We should fight for fair labor practices, but fighting to keep labor itself around is the wrong idea. Why keep useless jobs around? Just to keep people employed?
Right, that is the exact straw-man argument I was referring to.
How exactly is that a strawman argument? You act like technology does nothing for us. I agree that fighting for higher wages and other protections also makes things better. I don't understand why any of this makes the luddites right. Tech literally does work for us. You say tech makes people appear richer but it really only hurts us. What about medicine? What about the learning we can do through the Internet? What about the million other things that we can do that our ancestors couldn't?
Nowhere, not once, did I say we should stop tech from taking jobs. I didn't even imply that outcome. I would even say I directly contradicted that. Yet you introduced it as the easy-to-dunk-on premise and then proceeded to dunk on it.
It's a textbook strawman. Not only that, but it is the exact one I referenced in my post, so I guess I'll just copy and paste:
> value created never makes it back to the economy, shareholders celebrate profit highs
I once wrote some software that replaced almost an entire accounting department. No bonuses were paid, no salaries increased for the few remaining people, it just went into the shareholders pockets. The company was already very profitable before this.