Comment by Finbel

I feel there's an interesting juxtaposition between these two quotes:

"The economy has absorbed automation before; agricultural employment collapsed from ninety percent of the American workforce to two percent and civilization continued. David Autor at MIT has shown that roughly sixty percent of today’s jobs didn’t exist in 1940. New technologies create new categories of work. True. But there’s a difference between an observation about the past and a law of nature, and the optimists consistently confuse the two."

and

"The assumption is that if you send people checks, they’ll find meaning in hobbies and community. They’ll paint. They’ll garden. They’ll finally write that novel.

This is ahistorical bullshit."

In the former the author establish that you can't make a observation about the past and take it as a law of nature. In the latter they refute arguments as "ahistorical bullshit" for not doing exactly that.

Especially since they then proceed with historical example, all of which had poverty as a strong contributing factor.