People have always talked about how technology killed a lot of blue collar jobs, and the counter-argument to that is that technology simply changed the nature of the work. Be that as it may, are fewer people still needed IN TOTAL? Stated differently, will technology lead to a society with a tiny segment of the population that owns everything while the masses live in abject poverty, only surviving by finding crappy jobs every now and then and/or being given just enough to get by from the ones on top?
I'd like to think that technology will make things better for people on the whole; human progress. Does anyone have an opinion on this one? Also, I'm wondering if anyone has unemployment stats from, let's say, 100 years ago.
Has technology reduced the total number of jobs?
Improved technology has redistributed jobs, but not necessarily reduced the number of jobs. Two centuries ago, our country was primarily agrarian. As technology improved, we shifted jobs toward manufacturing, and today we are becoming a service economy because of improvements in productivity and the shift in jobs to cheap labor in other countries.
A utopia for everyone has not panned out. It seems like the distribution of wealth and power is being skewed to favor of an elite few. The United States has managed to put itself in a very favorable strategic position in the world economy and this does help the average standard of living.
I'd like to see improvements in education, health care, and employment. We should try to assure that every citizen has the opportunity for education, work, and the pursuit of happiness.
Has technology reduced the total number of jobs?
The masses definitely lived in poverty centuries ago; technological advancement has created a major increase in real wages, mostly by decreasing prices. (note that real wages are nominal wages divided by prices; in other words - raises are only beneficial if they keep up with inflation.)
This has created the middle class that everyone knows and loves..........and is also the reason why, in the United States, the average %26quot;poor%26quot; person lives in a trailer and bitches that they can only afford basic cable - rather than starving to death on the streets.
well not really dun foret u gota maintain those tech and if they break down u gota hire people to fix it
yes it is true all this is the reason of frictional unemployment.This type of unemployment coincides with an equal number of vacancies and cannot be solved using aggregate demand stimulation. The best way to lower this kind of unemployment is to provide more and better information to job-seekers and employers, perhaps through job-banks in centralized computers (as in some countries in Europe). In theory, an economy could also be shifted away from emphasizing jobs that have high turnover, perhaps by using tax incentives or worker-training programs.
But some frictional unemployment is beneficial, since it allows workers to get the jobs that fit their wants and skills best and the employers to find employees who promote profit goals the most. It is a small percentage of the unemployment, however, since workers can often search for new jobs while employed 鈥?and employers can seek new employees before firing current ones.
Labor stats from 100 years ago? Here's some common sense to save you some trouble. Back then, very few wives participated in the market economy. Today, most wives do. Someone 100 years ago would not have believed it, if you told them by today, the portion of the population that was working in a formal job would double.
Far from technology eliminating total jobs, it has freed women from household drudgery and permitted the creation of about 100 million jobs over the last century, allowing the other half of the population to fully enter the workforce (as something other than prostitutes!)
Your concerns are old. Read the play from the 1920s, %26quot;RUR%26quot;, in which the word 'robot' was coined for artificial men. The plot of the story involved Robots casting humans out of work, creating mass unemployment, naturally. Since the writing of that play, the US economy alone has created perhaps 70-80 million jobs -- even though we have robots today, and even though our needs have also created millions of jobs in places like China.
Here's the scoop: technology enables humans to move upscale to doing more productive things. The need for humans is not eliminated -- there are always uses for humans. That's what's great about humans, they adapt, and can learn to do new things even if their old job is eliminated. Machines can't do that.
An economy that's not dysfunctional will always have essentially full employment, no matter what happens with technology, because there will ALWAYS be some manager or entrepreneur saying, Gee, If I had some more help here I could make more money...
It reduced hard labor and brought in white collar jobs.
No, technology helps us to work more efficiently. The main key is to have high productivity and low inflation and technology provide us that.
