Comment by philipov
18 hours ago
You can't only compare doormen to doormen, because the number of people and doors have increased too. You need to compare doormen to doors. All the apartment buildings I've known people live at on Manhattan have only had automatic doors. You need to show that automatic doors replaced unguarded doors.
1) What proportion of doors had doormen before compared to now?
2) What proportion of the population was employed as doormen then and now?
3) What proportion of the population benefited from doormen then and now?
You would be surprised at how flat the population of NYC has been over the last ~75 years. It was 7.8m in 1950 and 8.1m in 2010. https://www.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/data-maps/n...
That is genuinely shocking to me… I guess NYC is at “capacity” and has been for that long?
That is insane to me! I had no clue.
I don't think that's necessary to refute the original point. The point I was disagreeing with was that automatic doors have "won" and doormen are no longer relevant. Whether 25,000 is a higher proportion of New Yorkers now than it was in 1930 isn't really a key point. 25,000 remains a large enough number that it is not true that doormen have been wiped out.
That said, to your actual points, as an intellectual exercise: while the population of New York has increased since 1930 (from around 7m to around 9m), the number of doormen has gone up much much faster (from "a few thousand" according to NPR to 25,000). So on the criteria you listed there, the number of doormen has increased as well.
The doorman example remains true.