Whatever you call it, jobs keep getting "stolen" by technology, and yet employment rates stay high and average living standard keeps rising.

I'm genuinely fascinated by how this keeps happening, decade after decade, and yet most people are convinced the opposite is happening. I'm old enough to remember this exact discussion from 50 years ago.

We all see and interact with jobs that did not exist 20 years ago, and many of us work those jobs. And yet... this knowledge is somehow compartmentalized away from future expectations.

If you want a theoretical framework for why this keeps happening, my thought is that unemployed humans are an unused resource. And capitalism is really good at finding ways to use those.

A: 250 years ago, 98% worked in farming. Today it's 2% (who produce more food!). Assume that the other 2% are at least twice as productive, and you get that 3% of the population now produces as much as 100% back then.

B: It's hard to directly estimate how much GDP per person has increased in 250 years. But the typical number economists get when trying is that it's 30x as big. Which means 3.3% of today's workforce produces as much (per person) as the whole workforce did back then.

Both A and B can be critiqued, but the precise numbers don't really matter for the argument.

Money is a nations currency. It’s actually the people of that nations property and you only get a lease on it.

If you disagree then try to do something like ceding the land that you “own” to another nations and see how that goes

(It was piss.)

If we took Elon Musk's money away and simply burnt it, that would still be a net win for society as a whole.