I doubt we will see most of these impacts for 10 to 20 years. I wonder if this is a reason Trump wants low interest rates ? With low rates the rich can borrow at a low fixed rate and purchase items like Gold and Land. Then when rates have to raise, more $ for them.
It's also reasonable to expect prices to go down if there is a productivity boom.
https://www.oxfordeconomics.com/resource/bifurcated-how-the-...
The op didn't say that scarce goods would become something only the rich could afford, they said no one would buy anything.
Prices can only go up because to do otherwise harms shareholder value. None of the COVID inflation prices have come back down even though supply recovered. Prices continue going up.
Have you been to Seattle lately?
Private sector: + 687,000
Government sector: – 319,000
Total: + 181,000
---
The government sector doesn't produce virtually anything that counts toward GDP, so GDP growth relates not to 181k of total employment growth but to 687k of private-sector growth. So, no, this is not about eliminating jobs and a few people getting rich. It is about statistcs, and lying to force the agenda.
By a very narrow, technically-correct view, sure.
Preventing, say, people starving to death, dying of preventable disease, unchecked fraud, invasions by other countries, etc. probably helps GDP a bit.
This sounds very wrong?
> Gross Domestic Product (GDP) includes consumer spending, government spending, net exports, and total investments.
Even if we take your premise as given, isn't ~700,000 a pretty terrible number? Last year's headlines were, 2024 job growth was much lower than previously estimated, at only 1.5 million. 2023 was 2.7 million. Even if we put that down to pandemic recovery, typical pre-pandemic numbers were around 2 million outside of recessions.
I'm ignoring the fact that I don't actually know how government sector jobs contribute to or affect GDP.
Seems like by this logic, why not just cut ALL government jobs? Obviously that's a terrible idea...
a) the AI narrative is annoying if not intellectually dishonest as so much money is invested in it
b) this requires a trigger warning
But if we are counting no. of payrolls: might this statistic hide the effect which mass scale deportations had?
Note: not an US citizen
Deportations have pushed wages up in some examples (Texas healthcare industry) due to employers having to hire authorized workers to replace undocumented workers who would work for lower wages, but I have not seen broad data on this topic, citations welcome.
The economic metrics are masking a brutal worker economy, being held up by labor shortages (but shortages not yet sufficient to improve labor power), AI capital investment, and healthcare jobs (which will remain durable and in demand due to a rapidly aging US population) is my thesis.
because the jobs they do enable a lot of BS jobs, go unfilled and actually need to be filled to create other job growth while someone in the labor market for a long time is likely in a comfortable job that will be realized to be unnecessary and already replaced by disruption from newer lower pay equivalents.
(Also GDP is in USD which means it is down 30% in many senses.)
~3M+ deaths during the pandemic pulled forward a labor supply shock that would've happened more slowly over time, due to structural demographics ("Demographics are destiny", fertility rates never recovered after the 2008 GFC in the US [economic shocks destroy fertility rates], population has been held up with net immigration for the last half decade). Boomers have investments and real estate equity in some cases, Medicare and Social Security in others (with some overlap), and have constant demand for healthcare and other elderly goods and services. They make up almost 20% of the population.
Certainly, there is a bifurcation between undocumented worker jobs (agriculture, high physical labor healthcare, food industry) and documented worker jobs Boomers are retiring from. The latter is relevant for my points on labor market dynamics, the former is distinct because it is unlikely documented workers are going to flow into these low wage, low quality of life jobs without higher wages and worker protections (as one would expect). You see this with employers and farmers complaining there are no workers for them.
The data shows older workers are absolutely playing a material part in the economy, both as consumers and workers.
Seven economic facts about prime-age labor force participation - https://www.brookings.edu/articles/seven-economic-facts-abou... - July 1st, 2025
New Research of U.S. Labor Force Participation and Employment Finds Shrinking Prime-Age Worker Population Being Filled by Older Workers - https://www.ebri.org/content/new-research-of-u.s.-labor-forc... - August 23rd, 2024
Are Older Workers Propping Up The U.S. Economy? - https://seekingalpha.com/article/4531829-older-workers-propp... | https://archive.today/sKeyE - August 9th, 2022
> There are now 20 million more 55+ employed than there were in 2000. The 55+ population increased by 42 million (from 57 million in 2000 to 99 million today [2022]), a 74% increase. Total employment in the age cohort increased by 113%.
A really ignored aspect of this is that gig work is pretty prevalent once someone loses a stable job. This masks the unemployment with underemployment. There were headlines a while back about booming small business registrations as a sign of a booming economy. Turns out it was just a bunch of people registering businesses so that they can DoorDash
We are short DoorDash, Inc - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45690430 - October 2025
DoorDash: Unauthorized Dasher “Backdooring” Scheme Props Up Delivery Operations, Undermines Safety, and Unravels as Immigration Enforcement Widens - https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/cc91fda7-4669-4d1b-81ce-a0b... - October 23rd, 2025
We'll gain so much efficiency that the economy will evaporate.
The markets can't survive on capital alone.
LOL. Like a diet focusing on a single macro. When all that is left is capital, then that is an unhealthy diet.
I’m suspecting something like Soylent Green, but perhaps with more proactive action taken to free up resources by removal of masses who are no longer producing enough value to justify their expenses.
Following up, I believe eventually it will all be replaced by something much more resembling feudal power. Where bound servants provide service labor in exchange for protection/survival. Something like fuedalism but without the agricultural focus of manorialism.
"Every society is three meals away from chaos"
Including the security roles that ensure the unemployed workers don't forcefully express their dismay at being redundant.
Or, if that doesn't work (because the robots are too dumb), you can at least split off the economy into a "poor" and a "rich" part that are mostly disconnected from each other.
I joked with my manager when we were having a conversation about everyone being asked to use more AI, as an obvious precursor to keeping fewer employees to do the same amount of work: the end state of AI will be an AI manager having career conversations with the AI employee, discussing raises and bonuses.
It could be possible to have high GDP with low paychecks… it basically means the entire economy mostly consists of the wealthy few buying and selling things to each other. It is easy to see how that could happen if more things become automated.
You could imagine a world where there are only two people who own anything, and the entire economic productivity is generated by robots owned by those two people creating things and selling them to the other person, who uses those things for their robots to work with. You could produce tons and tons of things with no workers, and the GDP would keep growing.
Of course, the high GDP doesn’t mean everyone is fed and sheltered. Having a functioning and growing economic market is required for capitalism to serve its purpose of providing for the citizens, but it isn’t the ONLY requirement. If the form capitalism takes as we move into the future is one that stops providing for enough of its citizens, it won’t be able to sustain itself. I think there are things we can do to shift our capitalism to do a better job of providing for everyone, but there are a lot of forces fighting against that.
A similar thing happens when people talk about "total debt" in an economy. I like to bring up the scenario of 3 people trading a shiny rock around in a circle. Each time seller doubles the price and agrees to defer payment.
In this way, three kids spending an evening in a bedroom can run the nation's average household debt to infinity. There are a few flavors of GDP calculation, but I expect it could yield some similarly odd results.
In both cases, the map is not the territory.
This is a recession - it will be a full-on depression if we get a doveish Fed chair... it might be one anyways, we'll need extremely adroit action to recover into a healthy economic state.
But hey, DOW go up and that's all we care about, right?
Additive Manufacturing, industrial robotics, the Internet, and the proliferation of computers had already made large portions of manufacturing and low skill white collar jobs redundant by the mid-2010s.
Furthermore, the brutal reality is most businesses can generate growing revenue just by concentrating on the 90th percentile and above of households [0], (edit: or at best the 70th percentile of households of income [1]).
For example, despite all the love Costco gets on HN - the reality is it only targets customers within the top 50% of households by income [2]. You may delude yourself into thinking that you are a thrifty underdog when you shop at Costco, but the reality is most Americans cannot and will never be able to afford Costco, and Costco doesn't want or need their business.
A K-Shape Economy is actually the historical norm.
[0] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/income-share-of-the-top-1...
[1] - https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-calculator/
[2] - https://www.businessinsider.com/how-costco-sams-club-shopper...
That said, the reality is that the 70th percentile of household income nationally is a little over $130K [0] and the US is a country with a population of around 341 Million people.
Therefore, you can have a self-sustaining ecosystem with around 100 Million Americans who are members of households earning above $130k a year - you would end up making more than targeting the bottom 70%.
Most skilled (SWE, Accounting, Law), semi-skilled (Automation Engineer, Mechanic), civil service (Police, Teachers, Local government employees, Military), and union employees all marry people within this strata and remain in that strata.
[0] - https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-calculator/
The reality is, America1 or France1 has tastes and sensibilities closer to India1 or China1 instead of America3. As such, there's no point targeting America3 or France3, because it doesn't dramatically grow your TAM the same way India1 or China1 could.
This is why Walmart and Amazon began pivoting heavily into the India and China consumer market in the mid-2010s.
The India 1/2/3 concept the Blume Ventures came up with is a modified version of a similar mental model we used to analyze China back in the 2000s and 2010s which itself is was forked from the principle of market segmentation.
I think a much more realistic explanation than robotics and 3d printing is the outsourcing of the social and environmental costs of industrialization to countries willing to bear it, like China, Vietnam and Mexico.
Containerized shipping, email, and computerized logistics have made globalization efficient, and therefore inevitable.
Heck, I used to live in LA as a kid at that time in the 90s and 2000s and the sweatshops (yes we had sweatshops) sewing clothes for Gap were staffed by undocumented Mexican, Korean, Thai, Chinese, and Vietnamese migrants in the Fashion District.
On the other hand, even highly paid manufacturing segments like automotive had already normalized industrial robotics by the early 2000s [0].
Basically, income mobility was already dead by the 1990s [1]. The difference is most Boomer HNers were insulated by that because it is clear almost everyone on HN who grew up during that era grew up in a 50th percentile and above household back then and wasn't the head of a household in the 1980-2005 period.
[0] - https://unece.org/sites/default/files/datastore/fileadmin/DA...
I'm not familiar with the healthcare sector. Is this where the job growth is?
The country is getting older and I expect there would be a lot of demand for non-AI-replaceable nurses and elder care. Many of those workers have also been deported or scared out of the country.
https://www.wsj.com/economy/jobs/january-jobs-report-unemplo... | https://archive.today/9gdEO
Healthcare job increases should not be unexpected as the country ages, deaths outnumber births in 21 states (as of this comment), the demand for care will only grow over time.
https://usafacts.org/articles/america-is-getting-older-which...
> As of 2024, 18% (61.2 million) of Americans are 65 or older, according to Census Bureau data. The national population over the age of 65 has more than doubled since 1980, with three-quarters of that growth occurring in the 21st century. The 65 and older group grew by more than 26.2 million people, a 74.6% increase, during that time.
https://www.prb.org/resources/fact-sheet-aging-in-the-united...
> The number of Americans ages 65 and older is projected to increase from 58 million in 2022 to 82 million by 2050 (a 42% increase), and the 65-and-older age group’s share of the total population is projected to rise from 17% to 23%. The U.S population is older today than it has ever been. Between 1980 and 2022, the median age of the population increased from 30.0 to 38.9, but one-third (17) of states in the country had a median age above 40 in 2022, with Maine (44.8) and New Hampshire (43.3) at the top of the list.
It is very unlikely the work done by CNAs, RNs, physical therapists, and others providing this population care can or will be automated.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/goldman-nasdaq-ceos-headlin...
Someone has to wipe our Boomer arses. An aging population means more healthcare and less of everything else.
And a much more intense shift to financialization.
Pension funds tends to target an IRR of around 20-30%, and it is they that are the biggest pools of capital that us GPs invest.
You ain't hitting that amount of IRR without an extreme degree of ruthlessness.
toomuchtodo•2h ago
pcthrowaway•27m ago
Prior to that it was incredibly unreliable; but I've only had success using it once (trying all mirrors) in the last couple of weeks.
Does anyone have recommendations for alternatives?
couatli•14m ago
I have found that https://archive.today/, https://archive.is/ and https://archive.ph/ don't resolve correctly when using quad9 or cloudflare dns servers. To work around that I use other dns servers for their name resolution. Maybe you're experiencing a similar issue?