Technology displacing workers

[Torie]

Assuming appropriate market mechanisms are allowed to work "properly," technology just changes the nature of jobs, and the relative pay scales between different kinds of jobs. So it is probably somewhat accurate to attribute some of the growing wealth inequality on technological innovation (heck back when most of the human species made about the same - just enough to keep barely alive and reproduce), but not the lack of jobs.

[Torie]

Assuming appropriate market mechanisms are allowed to work "properly," technology just changes the nature of jobs, and the relative pay scales between different kinds of jobs. So it is probably somewhat accurate to attribute some of the growing wealth inequality on technological innovation (heck back when most of the human species made about the same - just enough to keep barely alive and reproduce), but not the lack of jobs.

Regarding the part I've underlined - what do you think the vast majority of humanity, under capitalism's heel, makes now?  Nothing has changed, Torie. 

Everything has changed opebo, and much has changed in my own lifetime. Been to Mexico lately? It is nothing like it was when I was a kid. Heck, in my gardener's little town of maybe 10,000 when he was a kid, only one family had a car and money, and to get there, you needed to drive 3 hours on dirt roads. Now about a third of the population own cars, and the place is bustling. There is a substantial middle class. Tecate on the border is the same way. When I was a kid, Tijuana had no paved roads. Now it does of course, and also has a very substantial middle class, and most of the horrible hovels and tin shacks put up by squatters with no utilities are gone. They are all gone in Tecate, which used to have about 5 miles of them strung along the road to Ensenada. Granted, a few places are still not too far away from our species' beginning. But most places are these days are. The increasing wealth of the developing world, and the standard of living of the average Joe, is simply stunning to me - and gratifying. Most of it has happened my lifetime.

And then there is Thailand, which presumably you know about, with a rapidly increasing standard of living - very rapid. 

Facts just don't get in the way of your ideology do they?

[Torie]

Well at least opebo I have succeeded in weaning you are off the nothing much has changed when it comes to a bare subsistence existence for almost all since the Cro-Magnon man appeared kick, and got you back to mainstream Left thinking that allowing much inequality in outcomes to exist is intolerable. I consider that quite an accomplish, given your stubborn ways. In fact, I am going to give myself a pat on the back!

[Torie]

It is all about time horizons Franknburger. Your point about job destruction, and argument that more are destroyed than created, to the extent it is true, is more true in the short term while the market adjusts, than in the long term, after the market has adjusted, and folks move on to something else (granted it might be a job they don't want, and won't take, until desperate). Within a generation, as young folks are trained to be more adept with the new technologies, or new jobs created given the technologies that exist (e.g., folks pay for personal services that they didn't before, because machines make former services cheaper, so they money to spend on new ones, like massages and hookers, and more time at resorts, etc.), because presumably all the buggy whip making factory rats as it were will be retired or dead who were unable to learn how to repair cars.   

And sure, we need policies in place that make sense, to deal with technological shocks.