Stop Blaming Technology!

Society doesn’t owe you a middle-class life.

I fundamentally disagree with Jaron Lanier’s position on middle-class jobs. He seems to think that people are owed a decent job, even if it takes artificial scarcity (like taxi medallions) to make it happen. That’s not how the world works. You get paid when you do something that somebody else finds valuable. If you can’t do anything like that then you need to learn how.

It’s fine to get a free ride from society when you’re a child and haven’t yet had enough time to learn how to do things that provide value to others. But eventually you have to support yourself and save up money to get you through the occasional dry spot. You need to buy insurance against rare disasters. That’s your problem, not somebody else’s.

Yes, technology inexorably makes things easier and more convenient. That’s a good thing. And the people who build it deserve to be rewarded when they make everybody else’s lives better. Yes, that means the set of things humans can do to provide value to society shrinks over time. That’s not a problem. It just means there are more people to do less work. It means we can spend less time working once we find new ways to provide value.

I don’t believe it will come to this but if someday technology is able to make everything so easy that we can all do everything we need on our own then nobody will need to work anyway.

There is one thing I agree with though: rentiers are bad for society. If we end up with a society where machines do all the work, there’ll be no reason to let some people own real estate and charge others rent for it. We may not even need a market system to allocate real estate; we could just build up until everybody who wants to can live in Manhattan et al and there’d be abundant space for those who want a more rural experience to live in a home built for them by robots.