You continue the grand tradition in economics of the Luddite fallacy, or the fallacy of the loom. Technology has advanced by leaps and bounds in the last 150 years . . . and billions MORE people are employed today than 150 years ago.
Simple is that. Am I going to believe your theory or my lying eyes?!
No, you incorrectly extrapolated my microeconomic argument into a macroeconomic prediction that I never made.
My point is simple: People who lack any marketable skill other than a high school degree and who refuse to retrain to meet market demand (which is just another way of saying “provide stuff people want”) are going to be poor. They will always be poor. Nothing the government does can change that in any sustainable long-term way. No one “owes” them a job. You aren’t entitled to make a living just because you are willing to work. You MUST provide something people want of their own free God-given will.
Your argument simply reinforces, rather than repudiates, my position. Society in the past progressed because the base population progressed forward WITH technology not against it. The generation that made automobiles and planes in domestic factories LEARNED THOSE SKILLS FROM SCRATCH because those industries didn’t exist in the prior century. They progressed to meet market demand. As I said before, the wise horse and buggy manufacturers retooled and become car plants. The ones that didn’t adapt probably bitched about their bygone glory days and wondered why they couldn’t feed their kids.
So I will say it again: Those who lack any discernible skills other than manual labor, which has become virtually free due to productivity gains in technology, will find themselves increasingly irrelevant and unable to survive because the wage a “free market” would set would be below a sufficient level necessary to feed oneself. That wage level is already artificially increased by the Federally mandated minimum wage.
To think that THOSE TYPES jobs are going to come back is delusional. But the free market presses on ... when the whalers died out, the kerosene market rose. When it fell, the crude oil market grew to power. Then came natural gas.
Society will be just fine. But the guy waiting for the steel mill to return? For the auto plant to start hiring again? Yeah, he’s out of his freaking mind. It isn’t going to happen. I’m sure there were old sea captains that were convinced the whaling days of blubber powered fat fuel were destined for a resurrection. They died hoping to see it with empty bank accounts.