Technical innovation increases the productivity of labor in industry. If production shouldn’t be wasteful, there needs to be a reduction in workers. Where do all these workers go if there’s no unemployment? In a capitalist economy the workers are left to die on the streets but in a socialist economy they need to get a job again, right? Does the state take the burden of cost of reeducating these workers to enter another field and factor this into calculations when introducing new technology?
I read innovation as technological innovation. Under capitalism when the supermarket introduces self-checkouts in the front and forklift trucks in the back, they don’t need as many cashier’s and shelf-stockers. So implementing new technology creates unemployment, i.e. is one of the causes of the reserve army of labour.
Ah, that could be it. I’m bad at answering people’s questions, I assume too much.
I wouldn’t go that far! Yours is a good answer and if the OP meant something else by innovation than technology, you’re right to question it. And even if they did mean that, your right to challenge the idea that innovation is good if it leads to such consequences.
It’s hard, isn’t it, the assumptions thing. It’s kind of automatic. Especially with writing online and on Lemmygrad. We tend to use an informal style as it’s appropriate for a forum like this. But that clashes with the theoretical content that were often taking about on here.
Then there’s the potential to come off as rude by telling someone their question isn’t tight enough. At the same time as giving the question a generous interpretation and answering it.
In formal essays, it’s common to tell the reader how you interpreted the question. But that can come off a bit strange online because it implies a criticism of the question, which then does the thing above but kind of passive aggressively this time.
We’re bound to talk past each other sometimes, or answer a question that wasn’t asked, etc, as these kinds of things slips in through the various quirks of the online.