Essay:The unemployment question in the advancement of technology

Your opinion goes here. The statement "technological advances causes’ unemployment" is fallacious.

The first fallacy is that the speaker of this quote thinks that employment is the ends to all means. Yet it is really a means to an end. The end is the accumulation of wealth most commonly attributed as "getting money". Money derives its value from the goods surrounding it. So let's compare the goods of 100 ad to that of today and the money of year 100 and to the money if today. If you read above you would see that the two comparisons are the exact same. The purchasing power of money in year 100 is exponentially less than that of today. This is only due to technological innovation by the free market. I'd rather be a minimum wage worker today than a king living in the years 1000, 1300, 1500. Why? Because what money could buy back then is nothing near what money could buy now. So fundamentally employment isn’t the issue because without the goods to buy from the money paid to a workforce at full employment it is pointless. Those who say we need to destroy machines to promote employment are stupid. Let’s examine a scenario in which the Suez canal was built without any machines and only the pure human power was used. How long would that of taken? How many more people would've been needed? How many more people would've died? All these factors would've increased quantitatively drastically if not of the technological innovations used. America could've been at full employment if only human power were to be used in the Erie Canal. That would've been great right? Wrong. All employment is not homogenous. The workforce would've been swallowed up by the Erie Canal employment and not enough for other industries. The more time a process takes up the less time a worker has to pursue other jobs that are of need to the economy.

Ok let's ignore the argument that employment isn't the most important and so on. The unemployment created by advances in technology is only temporarily and is needed. According to Joseph Schumpeter’s creative destruction for a new industry to sprout it needs to do so on the grave of an old. For example the horse and buggy industry which died off so that the unemployed could be hired by the new automobile industry which promoted greater efficiency. Traveling became cheaper and easier due to this and a short term unemployment period had to take place for an industry deemed by the market to die off. The other type of unemployment most refer to with technology is when machines replace workers. For example skilled workers in the industrial revolution were replaced by unskilled workers with machines. The discovery of a cheaper way of production would benefit the consumers of the economy namely the lower and middle class. The unemployment is also temporary in this case because the market would adjust and absorb the unemployment in areas that needed the workers but they weren't available due to a greater need in the previous area they were working in. This phenomenon can be evaluated with the marginal utility theory by the phrase, the marginal utility of types of work. Another valid point would be to realize that humans would rather not work and capitalize on goods rather than work. Hence the phrase “technology advances only through laziness, finding an easier way to do something hard". Work is a means to and ends, no one works just to work, they work to earn money. And money is only valuable relative to the products it could buy. So if technology was halted from progressing, costs would increase leading to a drop in living standards even if there is full employment. If the offer for machines to do all the work and humans didn't need to then that offer would've been taken up by almost everyone. No one wants to work; they want what comes out of working.