[burroisolator]

"In 1920, there were 25 million horses in the United States, 25 million horses totally ambivalent to two hundred years of progress in mechanical engines.

And not very long after, 93 per cent of those horses had disappeared.

I very much hope we'll get the two decades that horses did."

I'm reminded of the idiom "be careful what you wish for, as you might just get it." Rapid technogical change has historically lead to prosperity over the long term but not in the short term. My fear is that the pace of change this time around is so rapid that the short term destruction will not be something that can be recovered from even over the longer term.

[mxfh]

I just have no idea how rigerously the data was reviewed. The 95% decline simply does no compute with

4,500,000 in 1959

and even an increase to

7,000,000 in 1968

largely due to increase in recreational horse population.

https://time.com/archive/6632231/recreation-return-of-the-ho...

So that recreational existence at the leisure of our own machinery seems like an optional future humans can hope for too.

Turns out the chart is about farm horses only as counted by the USDA not including any recreational horses. So this is more about agricultural machinery vs. horses, not passenger cars.

---

City horses (the ones replaced by cars and trucks) were nearly extinct by 1930 already.

City horses were formerly almost exclusively bred on farms but because of their practical disappearance such breeding is no longer necessary. They have declined in numbers from 3,500,000 in 1910 to a few hundred thousand in 1930.

https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1930/...

[falcor84]

My reading of tfa is exactly that - the author is hoping that we'll have at least a generation or so to adapt, like horses did, but is concerned that it might be significantly more rapid.

[OccamsMirror]

To be clear though, the horses didn't adapt. Their populate was reduced by orders of a magnitude.

[burroisolator]

"You're absolutely right!" Thanks for pointing it out. I was expecting that kind of perspective when the author brought up horses, but found the conclusion to be odd. Turns out it was just my reading of it.

[nacozarina]

the stability of no govt faced risk over a 20% increase in horse unemployment