Comment by aianus
16 hours ago
The percentage of the population that needs to work will continue to go down because of aging and automation although you might not see it as a reduction of hours for a given individual employed person.
Already 38% of Americans aged 16 or older do not work and are not looking for work and yet are not dying from hunger or exposure. This would have seemed like a utopian dream to someone from the 1800s.
Source?
Being 16, 17 and 18 and not working is expected, given they are still at school. A good percentage of people aged 18 to 24 are studying full time.
This stat seems a bit misleading and doesn't support the "you can live and not work argument". How many of those people are retired? How many of those are under 18? How many of those simply cannot work? How many of those live at home or are on food stamp?
>is expected
... these days. 100 years ago you'd have a job at 12 in many cases, 14-16 if you were more lucky.
I'm not even talking about peasants from previous centuries.
But how is that possible? How can one survive without income barring homelessness, begging, prostitution, and other not so utopian options?
In the 1800s most families only had a single provider, so this percentage may have been higher back then than it is now.
the single providers were the children in the factories?
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Maybe you should ask AI to review your statistics and reasoning. A large amount of 16-22 year old kids are in school. And retirees 80+ are retired. I don't see how any of this is relevant to the idea of what would happen to the economy if there is an employment collapse. I don't know that this would also seem like a utopian dream to someone in the 1800s; I'm not sure what that means. I think someone from the 1800s would be surprised by a great many things and that statistic would probably be low on their list.