Is this a good argument for why societies tend towards maximum employment?

Question

I have sometimes wondered why, in an age of increasing automation, many societies still have "high" employment. And by "high" I mean over 80%. Why, for example, have not an increasingly smaller number of jobs been restricted to a smaller elite.

For example, if there was an island with one apple tree and an orange tree. And person (lets call him Adam) owned the apple tree and person (Bob) owned the orange tree. And suppose further that the only thing people needed for life on the island was apples and oranges then this island would theoretically support only two people and everyone else would starve.

But is this what would really happen? Imagine there were two men (for the sake of argument this is a patriarchal island!) who owned these trees. And there was also women on the island. Then what would happen is that these two men would want to compete for the females. To show who is most powerful they would employ butlers and servants and engineers to build red sports cards by giving out their apples and oranges.

In the end the island would end up with full employment with a near equilibrium balance between people employed by Adam Inc. and Bob Inc.

Thus even at a time when we have robots, there should theoretically be nearly full employment, as men (or women in a matriarchy) will employ people for all sorts of purposes as a status symbol even more than owning the best fleet of robots.

What do you think of this argument that there is a relation between sexual selection, competition, and male lust for power, that is a drive that tends to keep employment high. The implication being that if you restrict these things then employment will fall. And what would the counter argument be that despite this there will be a lack of jobs in future societies?

Answer 1

The basic reason for continued employment is that humanity has a very long list of tasks it needs/wants doing that are increasingly hard to automate. As the highest priorities at the top of the list get automated (food/water/shelter), that simply frees up worker capacity to work on the next entries further down the list.

Automation destroys jobs at one end (things we used to do that machines can now do), but simultaneously creates jobs at the other (things that were impossible before, but now with the aid of machines some very clever people can do). Jobs go from impossible, to possible with skilled labour, to possible with unskilled labour, to automated. We all take a step up the ladder. The unskilled do jobs the skilled previously did. The skilled do jobs that were previously impossible. There is no reason whatsoever for thinking automation leads to a net loss of jobs.

That was the Luddites' error. They thought machines would destroy everybody's jobs. Instead the Industrial Revolution created millions more jobs as what was previously skilled work came within reach of the mass of unskilled workers and previously expensive products came within the price range of the mass market of the poor. Indeed, in the most industrialised societies we don't have enough workers to do all the jobs we now want doing, which is why wages rise. Employers are competing for scarce employees. Automation creates more jobs than it destroys.

The only thing that could cause an end to jobs is if we ever reached the top of the ladder and solved all our problems with automation. Everything would be free. Everyone would be infinitely rich.

And so if we ever did reach the top of that ladder of self-actualisation, Adam and Bob would not be able to find anyone willing to work for them. Why would you? Robots and AIs satisfy your every need, for free, so why would you ever go work as a menial butler for some other guy to make him feel good? What would you need wages for? When everything is free, what would you spend your wages on? Humanity is still a long, long way away from reaching that point, but if we ever did, it wouldn't be the problem the neo-Luddites think it would be.