Economists generally believe that this is temporary. Workers will take new jobs that are now available or learn new skills to do so.
An example is how most of the population were farmers, before the agricultural revolution ans the industrial revolution. Efficiency improvements to agriculture happened, and now there's like only about 1% of the population in agriculture. Yet, most people are not unemployed.
There was also a time in England when a large part of the population were coal miners. Same story.
Each economic and technological improvement expands the economy, which creates new jobs.
There's been an argument by some, Ray Kurzweil if I remember correctly, but others as well, that we will eventually reach a point where humans are obsolete. There was a time when we used horses as the main mode of land transportation. Now, this is very marginal, and we use horses for a few other things, but really there's not that much use for them. Not as much as before. The same might happen to humans. Machines might become better than humans, for everything.
Another problem that might be happening is that the rate of technological change might be too fast for society to adapt, leaving us with an ever larger structural unemployment.
One of the solution that has been suggested is providing a basic income to everyone, so that losing your job isn't as much of a big problem, and would leave you time to find another job or learn a new skill to do so.
A major problem is all the money from these increases in efficiency go to a handful of people, who then hoard it. A market economy cannot work with hoarding, the money needs to circulate.
A market economy cannot work with hoarding, the money needs to circulate.
This is a common question in economics.
It's called technological unemploymemt and it's a type of structural unemployment.
Economists generally believe that this is temporary. Workers will take new jobs that are now available or learn new skills to do so.
An example is how most of the population were farmers, before the agricultural revolution ans the industrial revolution. Efficiency improvements to agriculture happened, and now there's like only about 1% of the population in agriculture. Yet, most people are not unemployed.
There was also a time in England when a large part of the population were coal miners. Same story.
Each economic and technological improvement expands the economy, which creates new jobs.
There's been an argument by some, Ray Kurzweil if I remember correctly, but others as well, that we will eventually reach a point where humans are obsolete. There was a time when we used horses as the main mode of land transportation. Now, this is very marginal, and we use horses for a few other things, but really there's not that much use for them. Not as much as before. The same might happen to humans. Machines might become better than humans, for everything.
Another problem that might be happening is that the rate of technological change might be too fast for society to adapt, leaving us with an ever larger structural unemployment.
One of the solution that has been suggested is providing a basic income to everyone, so that losing your job isn't as much of a big problem, and would leave you time to find another job or learn a new skill to do so.
A major problem is all the money from these increases in efficiency go to a handful of people, who then hoard it. A market economy cannot work with hoarding, the money needs to circulate.
The money is life. The money must flow.