Russell Roberts discusses the effect of technology displacing jobs:

Ironically, the process of substituting technology for people is what creates our rising standard of living over time. It appears to be the opposite - surely we can't get richer as a people if we're losing jobs in the telephone industry - surely that makes us poorer. But it makes the nation as a whole richer to have cheap long-distance. The telephone operators who lose their jobs have to find a new job. Sometimes it will pay less because their skills may not be as useful in other industries that will arise. But their children and grandchildren inherit a richer world where people are closer together. Do that in industry after industry and you get a change in our standard of living over the last 100 years of something between ten and thirty TIMES higher.

A few months ago I was on a radio programme with a trade unionist who said that while British Telecom privatization had been good for consumers, people's jobs were sacrificed. There are however vastly more people employed in our liberalized telecoms section than there were before privatization - and we also get to call the USA for 3p a minute. Telecom liberalization has given us the best of both worlds.