Banning Automation to Save Jobs

I saw an interesting video demonstrating how a company builds concrete homes using a giant 3D printer. This process sounds like a great way to reduce the cost of housing by building houses more quickly and cheaply. One of the commenters on the video, however, lamented that this technology would lead to unemployment in the construction industry, and this in turn would harm the economy. The Hungarian author Marcel Kadosa argues that such a worldview is based on the fallacy of “…treating labor itself as the goal rather than its outcome…” (p. 128). Tools were created to meet our needs using the least amount of labor possible. Our material quality of life is better today than it was 200 years ago in no small part because of the continuous development of labor-saving technology. We could easily create jobs by banning the use of bulldozers and forcing construct workers to dig with their bare hands, but that would make society poorer by diverting resources away from more productive tasks. Kadosa observes that “Industry is valuable not because it provides jobs, but because it supplies us with the things we need. That those engaged in this socially beneficial work make a living from it is merely a consequence of their activity” (p. 122).

Reference

Marcel Kadosa (1925). The Tariff Superstition: Why Protectionism Always Fails—and Who Really Pays the Price. Praxeum.