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If the Black Death is a good precedent there will be a serious shortage of low-wage labor for crappy jobs in a couple of years. Automation will overpromise and underdeliver in the medium term, Covid will have killed off many of the most desperate.
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Iirc in Europe, East and West forked in the 14th century based on the response to the labor shortage. Western Europe invented individual rights and permanently weakened the nobility, while in Eastern Europe serfdom went brrr.
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I’m reading this along the lines of Harari’s piece in the Financial Times. Different worlds might emerge from this pandemic - one freer and more equitable than now, another more authoritarian and unjust than now - but it may not be one or the other but different “strains.”