> This is exactly the perspective many executives have of their employees

There's a phrase for it in fact, "Human Resources".

Though that sounds more like natural resources, like trees for a lumber company or paper mill.

Probably there were people in charge of Horse Resources when horses were the dominant mode of transportation.

They still are, wherever people work with animals at small scale. People get attached, and the boundary between "animal as my fellow (if dumber) friend" and "animal as my main capital investment" gets really blurry. This was the reality for most people until 20th century, and we still see echoes of that in old books and stories.

Like there are people in charge of cows to produce milk and/or meat.

This sounds like a clever argument, but the mindset of some executives really has no impact on how differently horses and humans are treated in society.

To spell it out: When horses are no longer needed for a task, they are sold or sent to slaughter.

I hope I don't have to explain how differently you and I are treated when we lose a job?

To spell it out:

People need jobs in order to pay for food, shelter, and healthcare.

Many executives feel zero moral obligation to provides jobs to people and instead treat that as a necessary evil that gets in the way of profit. As soon as that evil becomes unnecessary, they will happily lay off as many people as they can.

In aggregate, when enough executives do that, then people will not be able to find jobs.

When they can't find jobs, they are unable to pay for food, shelter, and healthcare.

Even if the executives care, they are pressured by the board.

Even if the board cares, they are pressured by the investors.

Even if the investors care, they are pressured by the pension fund administrators.

Even if the pension fund administrators care, that far removed, they care about their pensioners more.

You're right that hardly anyone hires people because they feel a moral obligation. They need work to be done and pays what it costs to hire people.

Similarly, hardly anyone takes a job out of moral obligation to the employer. They need money, and accepts the best job they can get.

We've been doing this for many centuries now, and empirically it has been wildly successful for pretty much everyone involved.

> We've been doing this for many centuries now, and empirically it has been wildly successful for pretty much everyone involved.

In aggregate, yes. But if you zoom in on the trajectory, you can see that it's peppered with wars and revolutions.

Sure. But if you zoom out again, you'll see that the eras before was even more peppered with wars, revolutions, and genocides.

Also famines and diseases we can now easily cure wiping out entire societies.

I don't disagree. Trajectory has overall been great for people. Just saying it's not uniformly great for everyone at all times, in fact whenn it regularly flies off the rails, restoring it exacts a great cost from individuals and societies.

Maybe we don't really disagree on much at all.

I'm glad we had this talk :)

It's not really "many" centuries. It's more like three or four and even that's not uniformly distributed. There are still many subsistence farmers in the world, and almost all of us were doing that for thousands of years.

Also, those past few centuries have involved the largest violent revolutions and wars in human history.

The idea of employment and money is a relatively modern conception. There is no physical law that states it must work indefinitely and efficiently for all participants.

> To spell it out: When horses are no longer needed for a task, they are sold or sent to slaughter.

> I hope I don't have to explain how differently you and I are treated when we lose a job?

About the same once you run out of money. At least here in the US, ymmv in countries that have sane social safety net policy.

https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/06/justices-uphold-laws-targ...

Well, we don't currently eat horse OR human meat, so there's that.