For every coal and steel worker in the U.S. today, there are twenty-five retail workers. One out of every eight “American” jobs is in retail. This rates mention mainly because online shopping, along with brick & mortar advances of the Amazon Go variety promise to render redundant a high portion of retail jobs in the not-so-distant future. As is, more and more of us utilize self-checkout at our favorite grocery stores, and in superstores like Walmart. Considering the rather prosaic farm, some of the more advanced tractors of today do the work that 30 humans did not too long ago.
Such is the genius of investment. It saves us from needless exertion. Lest readers forget, before tractors and chemical advances like fertilizer, most people were born into a life of farm work. By necessity. Most human effort was directed toward the creation of food. It was a matter of survival until automation and science made it possible for exponentially more food to be produced with exponentially fewer workers.
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