An early 18th century map maker missed the narrow entrance to San Francisco Bay, and for want of an accurate map, generations of Spanish and American settlers by-passed one of the world's great natural harbours. Similarly, contemporary politicians routinely by-pass obvious solutions to social and economic problems. Consider unemployment, which is unnecessarily aggravated in western democracies when politicians base public policy on the myth that the supply of labour is largely limitless, and that the number of jobs available to employ that labour are limited.
Closer examination reveals that the inverse actually applies.
In the short term, the labour supply cannot be increased, except perhaps by massive immigration. A century ago, Marx predicted that by investing in machinery capitalists would create vast armies of unemployed. In the 1940s, Norbert Weiner, a pioneer of the early computers, forecast that computers would create unemployment on a scale that would eclipse the great depression. Following this line of argument, if advancing technology really destroys jobs, one might be motivated to begin a systematic and wholesale destruction of automatic dishwashers. Despite such dire warnings, employment in the world's industrialized democracies has risen since the first stirrings of the industrial revolution.