Hot takes on the Democratic frontrunners

[Undertoad]

Innovation continuously puts entire industries out of business, and we like that. 50% of us worked in agriculture a century ago, now it's 2% of us. The typing pool used to take up an entire floor of a company; within a decade it was gone.

Those people did not just disappear from the work force. The thing is, automation has always created more jobs, and so we are not suffering at all from the jobs that were lost. We don't miss them. We have single digit unemployment, even after most of the mindless manual labor is outsourced to China.

Things will be radically different with another level of automation. It will probably require UBI or something like it. But, on the other hand, if there is no cost of labor, the price of many things will drop - a lot. So the problem that UBI needs to solve could be radically different by the time it's needed.

~ IMO ~

But we will notice the problem first. We should solve problems we have, not problems that aren't problems yet.

[Griff]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Those people did not just disappear from the work force. The thing is, automation has always created more jobs, and so we are not suffering at all from the jobs that were lost. We don't miss them. We have single digit unemployment, even after most of the mindless manual labor is outsourced to China.

I'm going to assume that workforce participation rates are really hard to measure but...