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Old Posted Jun 18, 2016, 2:06 AM
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Acajack Acajack is online now
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Join Date: Aug 2006
Location: Province 2, Canadian Empire
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Quote:
Originally Posted by someone123 View Post
Yes, barring some unforeseeable technological change it's unlikely that this will make any economic sense. Even if one wanted resources from outer space, sending people would probably not be the best way to collect them, and you can give a person an extremely good standard of living for their whole life for the cost of a fraction of a one-way trip to Mars. Such a trip is many orders of magnitude more expensive than a steerage class transatlantic ticket in 1880.

I am in the camp that believes that job losses from automation will be a big social problem and that we haven't found a plausible solution yet in Canada; tweaks of 1980's policies aren't going to cut it. I also think that hard times are when it gets real with issues like immigration. Canada has not seen that yet and hopefully it never will but I'm not optimistic.

The framing of 19th century European working class outmigration as the continent or country getting rid of excess labour is interesting. I think that is exactly the kind of thinking that societies will need to abandon if they are to do well in the future. The economy really exists to serve people and give them a good standard of living. With modern technology it is possible to do that for everybody in a country like Canada even if many people aren't working, and by definition if automation improves in the future it will be even more realistic. The problem is one of distribution, as it was in 19th century Europe where many people saw their standard of living fall as their land was taken away from them.

There were lots of people in 19th century Europe who did not work and did not leave. They were the landed gentry who lived richly off of rental income. Generally speaking I don't think they added much economic value in the sense of, by their participation, increasing the amount of overall prosperity. So there was a double standard as far as some people needing to be "economically viable" to stick around and others not. In the future, everyone could be like the landed gentry to a small degree, or we could still have a small number of people who collect a disproportionate amount of the income. Where countries fall along that continuum, I think, will partially determine how well they'll do in the future.
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There has been some really good discussion on here and you made some good points, but regarding the people with obsolete skills, I do think there are a number of factors (in addition to the ones already mentioned) that make our era different from the Industrial Revolution.

For starters, our societies (even the more individualist "meritocracies") are significantly less ''sink or swim" than Industrial Revolution societies were.

High numbers of job losses are seen as societal problems that must be addressed (even if the measures are not satisfactory), whereas before it was more of a ''sucks to be you'' situation. Go knock on the church's door if you need help, or better still emigrate.

What this leads to is retraining and changes to education programs to adapt to the new economy.

It can still be painful for some but nothing like it was 100-150 years ago.

Things might not be perfect but the modern workforce is more nimble than people give it credit for.

The information technology revolution killed a bunch of jobs but also give rise to millions of IT jobs that did not exist before, to develop, implement and maintain those new thingamajigs that everyone wanted and are now indispensable.
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