> There were about one million working horses in the UK in 1900 but only 20k by 1914. No one found new jobs for those horses...
That's because most of them were killed on the battlefields of WWI. Here's the source of that part of the Wikipedia article:
The war used horses in great numbers for non-cavalry
purposes. It is estimated that some six million horses
served and substantial numbers of these were killed. By
1914, the British had only 20,000 horses and the United
States was called upon to supply the allied forces with
remounts. In the four years of the war, the United States
exported nearly a million horses to Europe. This seriously
depleted the number of horses in America. When the
American Expeditionary Force entered the war, it took with
it an additional 182,000 horses. Of these, 60,000 were
killed and only a scant 200 were returned to the United
States.
Most of them were killed on the battlefields in the first half-year of the war? Surely this 'slaughter of 980k horses' in a mere 5 months would more prominently noted in our history books?
Indeed, WWI didn't start til August 1914... seems unlikely most of the 980K were killed in the war, more likely attrition/glue factory as they were replaced by cars/tractors.
I just read Storm of Steel -- which is, by the way, The Best First-hand Account of World War One -- and it does seem like you can't go two pages without running into a dead horse.
And from a numbers standpoint, if 6 million died in a 4-year war, it doesn't seem far-fetched that 980k would be killed in 6 months, especially since for an appreciable chunk of the war the Germans hunkered down behind the Siegfried line to conserve forces for a 2-front war.
The first few months of WWI weren't that intense and the full-scale horror was yet to become apparent. At this point it was 'just another war' rather than 'the war to end all wars'. Enough so that at Christmastime the opposing soldiers were giving each other gifts and in one case played a game of football. The battles of losing 20,000+ men in a single day were yet to come.
Actually, the war was every bit as intense in 1914 as it was in 1915-1918. 400,000 casualties at the Battle of the Frontiers. 250,000 casualties at the Battle of Tannenberg. Half a million casualties at the First Battle of the Marne -- which included losing 20,000+ men in a single day.
Remember -- the war in 1914 was a war of movement. Which meant that men were charging across open fields to attack the enemy. The Germans wore leather helmets, the other armies wore cloth caps, and the French wore red trousers. Yet the armies had modern rifles and artillery. This was a deadly combination.
Battles in 1915-1918 racked up higher total casualties, largely because they lasted longer. The Battle of the Somme lasted four months -- because they kept fighting over the same piece of land. Whereas in early 1914, the armies were still fighting a war of movement, so they'd fight in ten different towns, and the casualties would be spread out over ten different battles.
The Christmas Truce was not a question of numbers -- for a lot of men had already been killed or wounded -- but attitudes. The soldiers still felt that their opponents were fighting honorably. Poison gas, the British starvation blockade of Germany, unrestricted submarine warfare -- that would all come later.
if UK horse population went from 1m in 1900 to 20K in 1914, with half the decline being attributable to WWI in 1914, that would mean 490K out of 510K British horses alive at start of war died in those 5 months.
While this is interesting, I don't think starting a war to send older people to is a justifiable solution. Sending the horses to slaughter or to war are different means to the same end.
The issue I have with this is that technology disruptions came in the form of moving manual labor from farms to factories.
The service wave of disruptions moved manual labor to communications labor.
This wave of disruption is moving both of these to intellectual labor. Do I think that we have vast resources of unexploited intellectual labor? Yes. The issue is that the more people I meet the more I begin to believe the key to intellectual success is intellectual culture. Unfortunately, I don't think we have a very intellectual culture and culture changes slowly -- far slower than technology.
Not only is the culture of anti-intellectualism to blame, but so is the prevailing culture of intellectualism. It is hardly feasible for the majority of the workforce to get a PhD or even a Masters, which is still the cultural baseline for work in many intellectual fields. With the rising costs of education, even a BS is out of the question for many people, and it is not even an appropriate choice for many who would otherwise be inclined to intellectual work. Until we have widespread acceptance and a proven track record for more non-traditional forms of education, the rest of the cultural change you describe will be stagnant at best.
Lots of programming jobs hire based on experience and knowledge, not formal education. It is possible to gain experience without having a "job", but at an opportunity cost of time and lost wages from a low income job. Most knowledge is available for free on the internet and libraries, with additional in-person resources available in urban areas via informal networks and meetups.
This route still works out to considerably cheaper than a traditional college education, takes less time than college, and has the potential for immediate employment once qualifications and prerequisites have been met. Last time I checked, every company wants to hire a "rock star" if they could only find one...
> Lots of programming jobs hire based on experience and knowledge, not formal education.
I hear a lot of people say this here, but that's not true for most jobs in the industry. For big companies good luck even getting past the HR without a degree.
> I hear a lot of people say this here, but that's not true for most jobs in the industry. For big companies good luck even getting past the HR without a degree.
Most of the people I know who do hiring, including some in Fortune 100 companies, very frequently identify through networking, not HR. Yeah, if the company hasn't heard of you until you hit the HR front door filtering process, your going to have trouble without a degree, but if you are coming in that way, you are already behind the curve.
Not everyone has the specific skills needed to do the job, either: to be maximally employable, those are both things that you would do well to develop (I'm much better at the skill side than the connections side myself, but that doesn't stop me from recognizing the fact that connections matter a lot.)
I think you misunderstood. What you're describing is a culture of education. What I'm describing is a culture of intellectualism. Knowing things for the sheer joy of knowing things. To quote from HN, gratifying one's intellectual curiosity.
The people who know the most and, moreover, learn the best, tend to be those who love to know and learn. It is that which is so rare in our society. The Tweet, the press release, the short pithy blog post; these are consumption disguised as learning. I come to HN to learn -- unfortunately even here I suspect that maybe a tenth of the articles teach me something.
Or if the costs of education in the US were brought down and/or subsidies by the government as they are in other countries (or even paid outright like some European countries)
The cost of getting an education in the US is minimal or nothing. The cost of getting a degree from many schools is very high. However, there are still small universities where you can graduate debt free even with a minimum wage job.
Except when a horse became a cost instead of providing income, it would likely have been slaughtered. I don't think that's the path we want to take with people.
Birth rates tend to stabilize in first world countries anyway. The only reason that isn't happening in the US is immigration--legal and otherwise. In Japan, the population is decreasing. In Europe, it's near zero growth in many countries.
Some people do have a lot of kids. However, the overall total fertility rate in the US was estimated in 2011 at 1.89 kids/woman, below replacement level. So without immigration, population would indeed be shrinking.
It sounds like you're talking about 'immigration raising the population', which is slightly orthogonal to the grandparent post statement that birth rates tend to stabilize, but are higher than otherwise because of immigration. I assume what he was actually referring to was the tendency of first generation immigrants to have a higher birth rate than non-immigrants in America.
Based on the glee that a significant proportion of Americans seem to derive from cutting social safety nets, that appears to be exactly the path we seem to be heading down.
> Why do low-income individuals often oppose redistribution? We hypothesize that an aversion to being in "last place" undercuts support for redistribution, with low-income individuals punishing those slightly below themselves to keep someone "beneath" them. In laboratory experiments, we find support for "last-place aversion" in the contexts of risk aversion and redistributive preferences. Participants choose gambles with the potential to move them out of last place that they reject when randomly placed in other parts of the distribution. Similarly, in money- transfer games, those randomly placed in second-to-last place are the least likely to costlessly give money to the player one rank below. Last-place aversion predicts that those earning just above the minimum wage will be most likely to oppose minimum-wage increases as they would no longer have a lower-wage group beneath them, a prediction we confirm using survey data.
Wow. That's exactly it. Having spent most of my adult life below the Mason-Dixon line, that is exactly it. That and the comments noting that people receiving a benefit fail to recognize that program as an entitlement program.
This is too true. Here in Minnesota, we had a state representative equate food stamp recipients to animals in two separate speeches. In her rural district, almost twenty percent are on welfare programs and most residents are under the poverty line and qualify for food stamps. They still vote for her in spite of statewide coverage of her statements.
The attitude that everyone else is lazy and abusing the system seems most common in poor rural regions that depend the most on benefits. It usually has racial, anti-urban overtones that imply "we're only suffering because of THOSE people who don't look like us." It's a form of scapegoating.
That's an interesting point and I notice similar behaviour in the UK. People will talk up a politician who promises to "end the benefits culture" despite being on benefits themselves.
The reasoning is usually along the lines of "oh he's just talking about those other people on benefits who don't deserve them. Not good hard-nonworking folks like us"
That's a bit of an incomplete description you give, though.
Poorer regions that more benefits do tend to vote for people to cut those benefits. But as Andrew Gelman has demonstrated, it's not really the people getting the benefits who want to cut them: it's the professional and ruling class in the area who do.
Nearly everywhere the lower classes do want more benefits, but the big difference between regions is what the powerful people want.
Perhaps those who are receiving entitlement (and advocating for its abolition), may be using reasoning that you don't recognize. For example, could some of these recipients be very guilty about their use, and, are voting to end them because they don't see any other way out for themselves? Accepting a free handout is a very hard thing in our culture, especially for those that know the gift they receive was forcibly taken from others.
Take a glance at the comments - apart from the usual anti-lawyer screeds, the other main theme is that it'll be way too expensive and they're not worth it. There are some impressively nasty opinions, and a regrettably large number of people who think that way.
There is some strange mental block that makes it difficult for people to understand that technological progress does not and will not result in mass unemployment.
Here's a clearer example with humans instead of horses:
200 years ago, Shoemaking was one of the world's largest industries. Today, it represents a very small fraction of the world economy and almost all shoemakers have been replaced by machines.
What happened?
As shoemaking machines became commonplace, shoemakers were suddenly unable to compete. Some of them found other jobs, some of them became destitute. Most were probably able to keep shoemaking until they retired, as the shoemaking machines took a while to roll out.
However, the Shoemakers' children and other children in that generation were perfectly aware that shoemaking was no longer a viable industry. No one born after the popularization of shoemaking machines studied to become a shoemaker.
What is the result?
First, we now have less expensive, higher-quality shoes. This is not always an effect of mechanization, but it usually is. Second, we don't have mass unemployment.
Why do we not have mass unemployment? Because when you replace workers with less expensive machines, one of two things happen; either the factory owner makes more money, or shoes start to cost less. If the factory owner makes more money, they spend it on a yacht or something. If the shoes cost less, the consumers have more money to spend on food or books or whatever.
So, there are now very few people employed in the shoemaking industry, but all the shoemakers' children can now go into the expanding yacht-making or food-cooking or book-printing industries.
Recap: Mechanization does not cause long-term unemployment. At worst, it causes unemployment for a single generation of workers. Ultimately, decreasing costs in one industry contribute to the growth of other industries (either via increased profits for the wealthy or decreased costs for the non-wealthy), so there is not a significant net change in employment.
It's not a mental block, it's because it is plausible. Just because it hasn't happened yet, doesn't mean it won't happen. In the extreme scenario, if technology advances to the point where it does nearly everything better than humans for practical necessities, it is unknown how much that will affect employment and society as we know it. In my mind, it's not a matter of if it will happen, but how far away we are from that reality. We could be 100 years away or 1000 years away and that's where the more interesting argument lies.
In the extreme scenario you mention, we have effectively infinite labor. Provided we also have effectively infinite energy and resources (which is entirely feasible or only a matter of time if technology is that advanced), the value of all three of those things (labor+energy+materials) drops to zero.
That means we won't have to worry about employment. It will be an outdated concept.
But in the mean time, we also have nothing worry about, for the reasons I mentioned.
Problem is, the price of the nonlabor factors will never actually drop to zero. Energy and materials are basically things you pull out of the ground, and there's always going to be rent-seeking on natural resources.
Perhaps not mass unemployment, but certainly a shift to less valued employment (i.e. service jobs). There's a reason we're seeing a larger income gap now, and it's due to a shift to capital creating value in the economy rather than labor. Lower income folks are getting even poorer by shifting into low skill jobs and people who control capital are getting wealthier.
You know, there was that 'labor movement' and typical working hours decreased in 200 years from 16 hours a day, 7 days a week to 8 hours a day, 5 days a week + vacations. It is a good reason for the lack of mass unemployment, isn't it?
That's actually part one of the side effects of mechanization that I mentioned; not only does employment stay roughly the same, but we get better goods for less work. "The labor movement" had little to do with it; the amount of labor required for sustenance simply dropped to a remarkably small number of hours per day, thanks to technological advancement. The fact that we now have roughly 40 hour workweeks is simply how our culture responded to an exponential increase in productivity.
So I'm not really sure what you're getting at. Are you complaining that we get to work so little and have so much?
Previous technology based labor disruptions have been countered largely by economic expansions. At least until recently economic expansion required labor. If a new technology put people out of work, there was another growing area to get work in.
But we have kind of hit a tipping point though. Both in technology getting more efficient at automating even difficult work. As well as economic growth at least domestically is no longer as strong as it has been in the past.
Every time these disruptions happen people said we had hit a tipping point and it was going to be different this time. Not sure how this time is different.
The stock market is not economic growth. A far simpler explanation is that investors simply expect things like the labor market to recover, which is exactly why the markets react dramatically when the monthly jobs numbers are released.
Though the market adjusted, it does not always adjust in an optimal manner. With the increase in automation we've seen a shift into service jobs. These jobs are low income, low skill and often do not provide a living wage. They also don't actually increase wealth or create any real, long lasting value. This creates an income gap, which is what we're dealing with now.
The primary means of generating wealth has shifted to controlling capital from adding value, and that's not a good thing either. Those horses died off, we can't count on people to do the same.
Horses are able to provide more than muscle power! They can tread over ground unsuited to the most primitive vehicles. They can fit in narrow spaces, they don't require petroleum, and they have enough intelligence to avoid certain kinds of absentminded user error. They are animals and they have personalities that machines will never have.
Surely someone could find new uses for old horses, after all they are organic and adaptable in a way that machines aren't.
And somebody did find new jobs for those horses! 2% of them, at least. The balance got slaughtered.
You can wave your hands and argue that the jobs are out there or will appear given sufficient creativity, but the market simply doesn't care about the faith you have placed in it. Your optimism doesn't control the unemployment level. We have to prepare for the eventuality that the jobs don't materialize, and we have to do it in a way that doesn't heap perverse incentives onto the unemployed while choking off the very consumption that fuels the economy in the first place.
"And somebody did find new jobs for those horses! 2% of them, at least. The balance got slaughtered."
I do not think this was as much of a slaughterhouse as that makes it look. Today, horses typically live for 20-30 years or so. In 1900, I would think working horses would be lucky to reach 20 years; as they became older and less productive, they would be sold of and slaughtered.
With an average 'working career' of 10-15 years or a horse, just stopping buying replacement horses would be enough for most of that decline in the number of working horses.
No. Just look at the horsemeat scandal. Large numbers of horses were being slaughtered in Romania and Ireland for economic reasons and are being eaten. They cost a lot to feed.
One more data point - whaling industry was once fifth largest industry in the US and employed 1% of all workforce (auto industry, for comparison, employs about 0.5% of workforce, 1% would be around 1.5 mln jobs). Could you imagine fifth largest industry now almost completely disappearing? They probably couldn't either.
You are correct. The something new, at this point, is going on disability and waiting it out until they get Social Security payments. Most 50-year-olds with a high school education will not be becoming coders. If we are lucky, their kids are already working office jobs or have enough education/knowledge to do so.
As a country and society we will of course find new things to do, hopefully even replacing our manufacturing loss with even better technologies and methods. However, we will always have a huge discontinuity produced by globalization and automation that abandoned a significant portion of the population without the skills or the hope to catch on to the new fields.
So you're saying that rapid raise of number of people that can't do anything valuable enough for any employer will never happen? Or that it's not just yet because it wasn't just yet the last time?
Big technology disruptions have happened before. The market adjusted and something new came along for people to do.
I like to argue: There were about one million working horses in the UK in 1900 but only 20k by 1914. No one found new jobs for those horses... [1]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_horse_in_Britain