You haven’t responded to anything I said about the balance of production, or what I said about decreasing living standards. At the risk of throwing more words into the void:
High unemployment is very bad. But that doesn’t mean an economy is fine as long as everyone is employed: if there are important jobs that can’t be done, that is also bad. And because workers are not all the same, that means it’s possible to have high unemployment in one sector (e.g. all software developers get laid off because of AI) at the same time as having not enough people in another (e.g. we don’t have enough nurses in our hospitals).
You can hope that this will balance out and that you can retrain your software developers to go and be nurses. What you do at your peril is assume:
that the numbers actually work and you don’t still end up with a deficit one way or the other
that this can be done in time to avoid a catastrophe
that this doesn’t cause suffering to the software developers who actually don’t want to be nurses and are wholly unsuited to it
The last point means that you in fact cannot just shift your workers around like this, and instead need a long period of shuffling around where some software developers are unemployed and killing themselves due to depression, others are training to be nurses, others are training to do something completely different, accepting lower pay because they’re going into a sector without high vacancies, causing some people in that sector to seek better opportunities elsewhere, and so on, until - hopefully - the sectors are balanced.
have you ever considered that the number of jobs over time is, in fact, not constant?
If you can do the same work with fewer people, that may lead, over many decades, to fewer hours worked per person, effectively increasing the dependency ratio (interpreted not, as it normally is, as “workers to non-workers” but “hours worked to hours not worked”). It did after the industrial revolution - it took a long time, and many lives ruined by poverty.
You haven’t responded to anything I said about the balance of production, or what I said about decreasing living standards. At the risk of throwing more words into the void:
High unemployment is very bad. But that doesn’t mean an economy is fine as long as everyone is employed: if there are important jobs that can’t be done, that is also bad. And because workers are not all the same, that means it’s possible to have high unemployment in one sector (e.g. all software developers get laid off because of AI) at the same time as having not enough people in another (e.g. we don’t have enough nurses in our hospitals).
You can hope that this will balance out and that you can retrain your software developers to go and be nurses. What you do at your peril is assume:
The last point means that you in fact cannot just shift your workers around like this, and instead need a long period of shuffling around where some software developers are unemployed and killing themselves due to depression, others are training to be nurses, others are training to do something completely different, accepting lower pay because they’re going into a sector without high vacancies, causing some people in that sector to seek better opportunities elsewhere, and so on, until - hopefully - the sectors are balanced.
If you can do the same work with fewer people, that may lead, over many decades, to fewer hours worked per person, effectively increasing the dependency ratio (interpreted not, as it normally is, as “workers to non-workers” but “hours worked to hours not worked”). It did after the industrial revolution - it took a long time, and many lives ruined by poverty.
Issues with pensions are already happening.