Except those service workers probably now have significantly longer commutes. Their quality of life suffers. I don't know how broadly your definition of service workers goes, but this affects teachers, police officers, firefighters, etc.
I don't think the parent poster would disagree with you. What they're saying is that the decreased quality of life for service industry workers hasn't lead to a negative effect on the economy.
I already addressed this in my original post. It seems obvious that the displacement of workers would hurt the economy. However, it does not seem to actually happen -- the cities with the highest housing prices have the highest growth of any cities in the world.
> What they're saying is that the decreased quality of life for service industry workers hasn't lead to a negative effect on the economy.
Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. High housing prices don't seem to hurt the economy. Quality of life arguments, whether they are right or wrong, are totally unrelated to that proposition.
The unfortunate thing is that common sense dictates that productivity should be going down with quality of life, but apparently, it isn't. Or at least, nobody has been able to demonstrate a correlation yet.
Quality of life can go down while excess productivity has been captured by corporations and distributed to shareholders.
As productivity went up over the last 40 years, we should've reduced the work week. [1] We didn't. And now we have corporations with trillions of dollars of cash they can't or won't invest [2], and tens of millions of workers who continue to slave away 40 hours a week.
As odbol_'s sibling comment states, most of HN's demographic doesn't see this despair or care.
You're abusing the law of averages though. Yes, productivity might be fine for the most "economically productive" members of society (e.g. programmers, middle managers, aka the privileged.) For everyone else, aka the people on minimum wage, their productivity and quality of life is severely hampered. But since if one janitor is forced to quit their job because the 3-hour commute is no longer worth minimum wage, they can just go find another person desperate enough to work for minimum wage. These people are often ignored and have no real public voice/outlet to let their plights be known. But of course, plenty of rich programmers on a Hacker forum don't think anything's wrong, because nothing's wrong _for them_.
