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Right back at you.
I hate it when people brandish "comparative advantage" as a talisman against the idea of technological unemployment, illustrating that they fail to understand it. Ricardo, the very economist who originally coined the term "comparative advantage" recognized that technological unemployment was still possible, even likely, despite it.
"Comparative advantage" says that the value of an individual's labor will never fall to zero, and that they will still be better off specializing in something, and trading the products of that specialty for the things they don't specialize in, than if they try to be fully self-sufficient. It does not at all guarantee that the maximum value of an individual's labor, when they specialize in their comparative advantage, cannot fall below their cost of living. Indeed, there are some people alive right now, among the most severely disabled, whose labor is worth less than what it costs to keep them alive. There's nothing in "comparative advantage" that prevents large portions of the population from joining them.
I'd point to this quote from economist Karl Smith back in 2012:
See also Smith in Forbes here. I can't find the specific passage at the moment, but I remember Gregory Clark in A Farewell to Alms also making a similar comparison to what happened to horses as an example of what could await most of us.
While human wants may be infinite, jobs depend on humans being able to meaningfully contribute to the production of those wants. Humans are finite, and thus, I would argue that our capacities are finite, and thus, the number of ways we can meaningly contribute to the production of goods and services is ultimately also finite. I'll point to Kevin Kohler's Substack post here:
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And what this leaves out, is that human capacities are not only finite, but unequal; some of us will "run out" of ways to meaningfully contribute — again, the value of contributing will never hit zero, but it can fall below subsistence — before others. (As a disabled individual surviving by parasitizing of hard-working taxpayers via the public dole, this is quite an acute point for me.)
Ok, let's work through this. Let's actually start here:
I agree that there are, and have always been, severely disabled people who are simply unable to support themselves.
Here, you acknowledge, but skip right over something key. You acknowledge that being fully self-sufficient is a lower bound. That is, excepting the severely disabled, the vast vast majority of able-bodied humans can, indeed, be self-sufficient, as evidenced by millennia of history. Comparative advantage means that you will be better off than being self-sufficient, by your own acknowledgement.
But here is where you contradict yourself. You just said that they will be better off than being self-sufficient. That is, better off than their cost of living.
Humans are not horses. They're still not horses. This is literally a meme on the badecon subreddit, for good reason. Humans have agency, can understand (or at least act as if they understand) opportunity cost and comparative advantage. Like, the primary things under discussion here are a major reason why humans are not horses. Horses are more like hammers than they are humans.
Sure. Irrelevant, but sure.
You're telling me that delivering me an even better standard of living than I currently have is going to be fully automated? And the marginal cost of such automation is going to be basically zero? (At the very least, lower than the cost of convincing someone to switch from their life of abundance and leisure to helping out.) Huh. Sounds pretty nice.
Like, what is even your model here? A magic robot that can provide all your food, shelter, luxury desires, etc., it costs how much? Why does it cost that much? Who is being paid when one is purchased? It must be obscenely cheap to beat out how cheap those things would be otherwise. $10? $100?
Nah, you already agreed that subsistence is a lower bound for anyone who is not severely disabled.
He said:
To try is not to be.
Right in that first block quote is:
That's your block quote. The second quote in my comment is from Capital_Room. They do not match as you say they do.
I'm really not following what you're trying to say. Can you try again? Capital_Room did, indeed, use the word "try". You pointed out that there is a gap between "try" and "be". I pointed out that I've already covered that gap with empirical evidence. I have no idea what you're trying to say.
Even if we assume your empirical evidence is sufficient to ensure humans can be self-sufficient (now and always), Capital_Room did not acknowledge that and you base much of your post on a gotcha that he allegedly did.
Sure. He has not yet actually assented to the empirical evidence that people can mostly be self-sufficient. I did not claim that he assented to this, and if he would like to disagree with this, he is still able to (so are you). I pointed out that he did claim that self-sufficiency was a lower bound for purposes of comparative advantage. I then also addressed his stated concern that a small class of people cannot attain self-sufficiency (e.g., severely disabled folks). But for all of the other folks, who I pointed out empirically can attain self-sufficiency, his lower bound holds that comparative advantage will still make them better off. Which would contradict his conclusion that a vast majority of folks will end up at sub-subsistence levels.
Now that we've cleared up that I have not claimed any assent to the empirical evidence and clarified further how the argument goes, do you have any objection to the logical portion of the argument? Or are you just happy that we've agreed that we're still waiting to see if he assents/objects to the empirical evidence?
No, I claimed attempting self-sufficiency as lower bound. As the disabled illustrate, it doesn't mean one can succeed. And I'd dispute that most modern people could achieve self-sufficiency if they stopped specializing in their comparative advantage. After all, we're pretty much all "specialists," even the farmers. And there are the necessary resource inputs — try being self-sufficient without any land, for example.
No, for most of those millennia, many were specializing and trading (even if just within family/household/tribe). And, per Karl Smith, they held certain then-scarce factors of production, the value of which automation will drastically reduce.
Irrelevant.
Humans have — had — value because human brains were a scarce factor of production, there being no substitute. But now a cheap, plentiful substitute is coming. When supply goes up, price goes down. What steam and fossil fuel did to the muscle power of horses, automation will do to the brain power of humans.
And sure, the transition to mostly-automated luxury would be nice… were human beings uniform and perfectly fungible. The problem is in the middle, when large fractions of the population have become parasites upon the fraction that's still productive.
Many material resources will remain scarce even as the value of human labor declines, which limits how cheap the machines can become.
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I don't know if I'm missing something, but I occasionally harp about how even in an opyimistic scenario, comparative advantage is not looking like Rats expect it to pan out. It's not going to be automating away the drudgery so we can devote ourselves to artistic and intellectual pursuits, if anything it's shaping up to be automating away artistic and intellectual pursuits, so we can artisinally mine quartz for the Quartz God.
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