"What makes the intuition so difficult is that usually, all things are not equal. In the case of agriculture, for example, the number of calories consumed in the world is relatively stable at any price, so in a simple model, any advance in technology that makes farmworkers more productive has to be offset by a reduction in the number of …
"What makes the intuition so difficult is that usually, all things are not equal. In the case of agriculture, for example, the number of calories consumed in the world is relatively stable at any price, so in a simple model, any advance in technology that makes farmworkers more productive has to be offset by a reduction in the number of farmworkers."
This is not quite true, or not solely. In this case, we can afford to be less efficient and spend said resources to feed animals so we can consume more and cheaper meat.
This is true - a more precise way to look at it perhaps is if the *overall* elasticity of demand for a product is less than 1, then technology that makes workers in that industry more productive leads to less employment. So even though there is some increase in demand from lower prices driven by higher productivity, it's not enough to offset the reduction in workers needed from that advance in productivity.
The general idea is that you have some products that are in the Jevons' paradox range, where elasticity > 1, so lower prices lead to a huge jump in demand, so higher productivity = higher employment. And then you have some fields like agriculture and manufacturing where the opposite is true.
"What makes the intuition so difficult is that usually, all things are not equal. In the case of agriculture, for example, the number of calories consumed in the world is relatively stable at any price, so in a simple model, any advance in technology that makes farmworkers more productive has to be offset by a reduction in the number of farmworkers."
This is not quite true, or not solely. In this case, we can afford to be less efficient and spend said resources to feed animals so we can consume more and cheaper meat.
This is true - a more precise way to look at it perhaps is if the *overall* elasticity of demand for a product is less than 1, then technology that makes workers in that industry more productive leads to less employment. So even though there is some increase in demand from lower prices driven by higher productivity, it's not enough to offset the reduction in workers needed from that advance in productivity.
The general idea is that you have some products that are in the Jevons' paradox range, where elasticity > 1, so lower prices lead to a huge jump in demand, so higher productivity = higher employment. And then you have some fields like agriculture and manufacturing where the opposite is true.