I can understand why in undeveloped ones, but doesn’t unemployment in a developed country mean “everything is covered we literally can’t find a job for you.”?
Shouldn’t a developed country that indeed can’t find jobs for its citizen also have the productivity to feed even the unemployed? is the problem just countries not having a system like universal basic income or is there something else going on here?
In: 1275
The amount of work needed to keep an economy and the society working, is less than the amount of people in that society. As production and efficiency increase, you need less people to do the amount of work required to make and do things.
Lets take few examples:
Before computers, how do you think engineers solved huge calculations? Well with computers; with people who’s job was to compute things, mainly women. These people filled a whole floor in a big engineering office and all they did was calculate things with pen, paper, slide rules. How were technical drawings done? The same way, you have an army of people who’s job it was to make drawings and to copy them by hand. With the invention of computers, copy machines and CAD software these jobs were no longer needed.
Go back 20 years and if you needed an accountant to calculate your small businesses taxes and do the financial reports required of you, you had to go to an accounting firm with loads of paperwork. Then someone would physically go through it all, deal with the numbers, input them and make the reports. Nowadays you can get an app in to which you can scan your receipts and papers, then which will automatically read them and input them for you or for your accountant. So less work is needed.
Lets imagine a field of potatoes. Before mechanisation, if you wanted those potatoes out of the field you had to call you whole family, you 10 children, and the local village along with the village idiot and drink to help you so you get them out before they rot in to the ground. Nowadays you get a machine, which one person can operate and then another for a tractor to take them away. This whole operation can run smoothly with 3-4 people; and now the self driving fully automatic harvesting machines are making their presence known on the corporate farms.
Cleaning the streets? I don’t know about where you are, but you no longer see dustmen with bins and brushes. What you see is a man driving a street cleaning machine that also washes the streets. So you don’t need to do this work either.
You need to dig a deep trench? You don’t even need a digger anymore, there are machines that can dig it at walking speed.
If you need to machine lots of components, you don’t get 20 machinist to run 20 machines, you get a machinist to run few CNC machines.
You need welders? Well we have been mechanising and automatic that industry at staggering speeds. Even before any sort of funky AI driven machine vision cloud processing systems we been able to do [this](https://youtu.be/Xe2LKEJxtdM).
The problem is that our economy works on maximising profits and with ever increasing efficiency. There is no incentive to hire people to do work that you don’t need them to do. The only solution, which is done in some places to some like Denmark is for the government to put people to any work. So you end up with unemployed people sweeping streets and cleaning parks just so they are “working for their benefits”, but this is not productive work so to speak. This kind of work doesn’t really make anything, it doesn’t add value. Yes clean streets and parks are nice, no denying that, but pretty parks don’t add to the society and the economy. Granted this is not fault of parks, but fault of a economic system that relies upon infinite accelerating growth and and constant added value.
Problem is that as automation gets better, less people are needed, the kind of people that needed are highly specialised and educated but there are even less of those jobs. Not everyone can do every jobs. I can weld, I can fabricate, and I can do engineering. However there is a huge demand for nurses and doctors, I can’t just switch in to that job – it would take 4-8 years for me to be able to do those things. There is a huge demand for welders and builders, granted the basic jobs are easy to train people to but not everyone can do these jobs. As a welder I know how easy most basic welding jobs are, and having taught few people I know easy they are to teach, and that most people simply just don’t have the natural talent to do them without the motivation driving them to do it.
Latest Answers