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1SMB5919BT3G4 karma

Obviously, technology destroys some jobs, but doesn't technology in total create jobs? Not so many people in agriculture these days, but there are people employed in building machinery that make people that do agriculture more productive. Furthermore, how many jobs were created, directly or indirectly by the Internet? Of course, I don't pretend that people who contributed to the creation of the Internet ever dreamed of all the ways in which Internet would influence the world, or of all the kinds of enterprises that it would create. So who knows what would Urbit do. I just wondered if, perhaps, you had some ideas.

And, here's Hazlitt, who, in his Economics in One Lesson writes:

"To go no further back, let us turn to Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. The first chapter of this remarkable book is called "Of the Division of Labor," and on the second page of this first chapter the author tells us that a workman unacquainted with the use of machinery employed in pin-making "could scarce make one pin a day, and certainly could not make twenty," but that with the use of this machinery he can make 4,800 pins a day. So already, alas, in Adam Smith's time, machinery had thrown from 240 to 4,800 pin-makers out of work for every one it kept. In the pin-making industry there was already, if machines merely throw men out of jobs, 99.98 per cent unemployment. Could things be blacker? Things could be blacker, for the Industrial Revolution was just in its infancy. Let us look at some of the incidents and aspects of that revolution. Let us see, for example, what happened in the stocking industry. New stocking frames as they were introduced were destroyed by the handicraft workmen (over 1,000 in a single riot), houses were burned, the inventors were threatened and obliged to fly for their lives, and order was not finally restored until the military had been called out and the leading rioters had been either transported or hanged. Now it is important to bear in mind that in so far as the rioters were thinking of their own immediate or even longer futures their opposition to the machine was rational. For William Felkin, in his History of the Machine-Wrought Hosiery Manufactures (1867), tells us that the larger part of the 50,000 English stocking knitters and their families did not fully emerge from the hunger and misery entailed by the introduction of the machine for the next forty years. But in so far as the rioters believed, as most of them undoubtedly did, that the machine was permanently displacing men, they were mistaken, for before the end of the nineteenth century the stocking industry was employing at least a hundred men for every man it employed at the beginning of the century."

1SMB5919BT3G3 karma

What kind of jobs would widespread adoption of Urbit create?