I don't view my candle maker argument as a straw man rather than an example. I could provide more examples starting at the industrial revolution moving forward, and I assure you there are countless, which would by definition make it not a straw man argument because I'm not misrepresenting anyone's position nor am I cherry picking 1 instance to prove my own argument.
As far as you're argument for unskilled labor, I have two things to say. 1. I think you are greatly overestimating and marginalizing people. Plenty, if not the majority of people have the ability to be innovators at least in some small way. 2. Even if your argument about unskilled labor does hold water, which I don't believe it does, you can break down a task into enough moving parts, or create a user experience in a way that people don't necessarily need to have genius levels of knowledge to be productive with the tools given to them. A perfect example is the military, where you take something like operating a jet aircraft and make it more accessible to people. There are countless of other examples in almost every field.
Finally, I can't prove it. I'm not a professional economist, I don't have the background nor the data to provide any sort of coherent theory on the subject. What can I point to though is history, the history of innovation throughout time. Horses to cars, the transition to computers, the internet, there are so many things that have increased efficiency and people have shifted and adapted and continued to innovate and move forward and there continue to be jobs and task for people.
The difference between now and the past is the nature of military and crowd control technology.
In the industrial revolution the luddites smashed the machines and threatened the elite with guillotines and Marxism. They could do this because guns were cheap and plentiful, and a group of men could be made into an army no matter how poor they were.
In response, the elite created social programs that would help the poor to become economically useful, and the elite would also pay the poor to join the military and conquer other nations, for profit.
Today, the elite's technological military superiority totally eclipses a mob of unemployed men. A group of angry poor can't even smash windows unmolested anymore, let alone break into corporate headquarters or private estates. Police are sophisticated crowd controllers who make use of psychological and non-lethal warfare that not only dominates but also pacifies.
It's not that new jobs won't be created. It's that the poor have nothing to offer to the rich, and so the poor are expendable, and the poor have no power, and so the poor are allowed to die.
> "I think you are greatly overestimating and marginalizing people. Plenty, if not the majority of people have the ability to be innovators at least in some small way. "
Having worked in a factory before with everyone from managers, engineers, machinists, and line workers... I think you give people too much credit.
It may sound elitist, or depressing, but for many people in this world there is no hope of them occupying an intellectual job. Either through sheer genetic lottery, nurture (or lack thereof), there are an awful lot of people with not the education or intelligence to become creative innovators.
> "A perfect example is the military, where you take something like operating a jet aircraft and make it more accessible to people."
A military aviator requires hundreds, if not thousands of hours of training time, and if you've ever met one, you'd realize that they're sharp as a tack. Aviators are probably some friggin' smart people - I do not believe they are at all a good, representative sample of the rest of the population, large segments of which cannot do anything but low-skill labor - and can never be fully retrained to perform as creative/intellectual job types.
Perhaps their children can, but these people, alive and needing jobs right now, are fucked for life.
> "What can I point to though is history, the history of innovation throughout time. Horses to cars, the transition to computers, the internet, there are so many things that have increased efficiency and people have shifted and adapted and continued to innovate and move forward and there continue to be jobs and task for people."
That's OP's point - we are at a turning point where, perhaps, these rules no longer apply. The majority of the world has historically been employed in agriculture or unskilled industrial labor. When we invented the car, carriage makers went out of work - but more unskilled jobs popped up in its place. When the cotton gin was invented, wide swathes of people went out of work - but there was demand for unskilled labor elsewhere. There may be periods of pain and unemployment, but ultimately the majority of these eliminated folk found other, low-skill jobs elsewhere.
We are at the first point in history now where we are eliminated unskilled work, but not replacing them with anything other unskilled labor, in any sector. If there's a Wal-Mart greeter created for every factory job lost in the USA, we might be ok, but there really isn't. And the greatest problem is that the gap between an unskilled laborer vs. a creative service-sector "innovator" is so disparate, that no possibility for retraining exists for the vast majority of the recently-made-redundant.
Also it's worth pointing out that even low skill service sector jobs typically only have employment for rigid demographics. When that sexy young waitress turns 30 her earning potential plummets and they really don't want her back. They want another 22 year old. What does that waitress expect to be doing when she is 55? Where does her value come from? What will her pension look like?
There is going to be a huge glut of unskilled poor living like animals in ghettos. It's going to be a humanitarian crisis of a 3rd world calibre.
> "There is going to be a huge glut of unskilled poor living like animals in ghettos. It's going to be a humanitarian crisis of a 3rd world calibre."
It's depressing and hard to accept, but I think this is the way it'll go down.
The sexy young waitress can, with some training, take on other low-skill labor jobs. A hit to earnings? Perhaps, but livable in the old days.
This has been the story for the unskilled labor class for decades - industries rise and fall, but when training is a matter of days and weeks, instead of years, labor mobility is extremely fluid, and retraining for a new position is possible.
A degree takes years, and tens of thousands of dollars these people don't have. Not only that, how many have the educational foundation to take on a job that requires strong understanding of maths and science? America's failure with STEM is really biting its ass right now.
> "We are at the first point in history now where we are eliminated unskilled work, but not replacing them with anything other unskilled labor"
We're also at the end of the first era in history where some forms of unskilled labor have put people solidly in the middle class. Unskilled middle-class work is being eliminated; there's some demand for unskilled workers, but not at those income levels.
This is going to lead to some hard transitions, which are going to take time to shake out.
As far as you're argument for unskilled labor, I have two things to say. 1. I think you are greatly overestimating and marginalizing people. Plenty, if not the majority of people have the ability to be innovators at least in some small way. 2. Even if your argument about unskilled labor does hold water, which I don't believe it does, you can break down a task into enough moving parts, or create a user experience in a way that people don't necessarily need to have genius levels of knowledge to be productive with the tools given to them. A perfect example is the military, where you take something like operating a jet aircraft and make it more accessible to people. There are countless of other examples in almost every field.
Finally, I can't prove it. I'm not a professional economist, I don't have the background nor the data to provide any sort of coherent theory on the subject. What can I point to though is history, the history of innovation throughout time. Horses to cars, the transition to computers, the internet, there are so many things that have increased efficiency and people have shifted and adapted and continued to innovate and move forward and there continue to be jobs and task for people.