Frumple: That was precisely the point of my example - this 'problem' has occured before. And when labour becomes more abundant, it will be used in more places - large-scale unemployment drives down wages, more jobs become profitable*, and eventually an equilibrium is reached. And that doesn't even include genuinely new types of employment, like the ones that arose during the Industrial Revolution.
Heh. I think I had a teacher once that kind of obliquely referred to that as the "tire problem" (not in those words, but it gets the idea across). Last time you drove down the road, your tires worked. The time before that, when you drove down the road, your tires worked. Means absolutely nothing in relation to whether they'll work the
next time you get on the road. All the times makeup of the labor force has changed, there's been room for it to adapt, places for people to go. Labor became more abundant and got used in more places or places not previously used. That's not a guarantee it'll happen
again*.
The worry is the proverbial tire has worn down -- the treads are soon to be gone. No more places
to use labor, or at least not to the extent necessary to support people. All the labor in the world and the cheapest of wages will do no good if the machine still does the job cheaper, or one person can do the work of twenty (or thirty, or etc. -- and since that twenty or thirty and one are competing over the same resources, you're going to see some of them, possibly most of them, left out.). And in general, once the workforce has shifted away from one sector due to productivity improvements... they don't really shift back.
Hopefully welfare will catch the slack (and improve in places like the states), but the obvious worry (especially for us poor bastards in the states
) is it either won't, or won't be prepared enough when the potentially inevitable happens.
*Mind you, it probably
will happen another time or two, but eventually...
It all depends on the price of robots, really. Assuming that a robot is cheaper than a human in every job probably won't be true.
Mm. Yeah, but full automation isn't the only problem, remember? The other side of it is productivity improvements. "Stupid" software alone is putting people out of work simply due to not needing as many to do the same work. Simple database software can make a lot of paper pushers superfluous, just as an example. What happens when it's cheaper to hire one human to manage multiple registers (due to ubiquitous communications improvements, perhaps) than individuals for each? There's only so many stores that can manage to be open, and so many people that would be needed to run them. And if -- when -- that's not enough for the whole (or, at least, enough to support the rest) population...