I think the Big Issue will be how the GDP produced by robots gets distributed. Currently, the 20 richest citizens of the US have more wealth than 160,000,000 of their countrymen and women. Capitalism seems to guarantee that level of inequality will only worsen as more and more jobs are automated. Possibly your point about jobs can only be resolved by separating income from employment?
Nature has a long record of balancing itself out. Have faith.
We seem to be approaching a tipping point where human engineered problems of increasing population and decreasing job prospects have created an imbalance that doesn't provide nature with sufficient time to address?
Roller coasters are better than merry-go-rounds. We all only have this one life to live and I want my money's worth, dammit!
Dude, mankind is part of nature.
Dude, mankind is part of nature.
A few years ago I read an article by the author of a book about how many things don't come to be until they are needed. He listed several examples. I wish I could remember the title, but the gist is that many our current problems will be solved one way or another just as all of our past ones have been solved.
One big difference between today and the dawn of industrialization is the number of available jobs. We have millions more who need jobs today competing with tens of millions more robots. Maybe we need a new economic paradigm?
There's certainly truth in your examples. A favorite past television show was James Burke's "Connections" (he did a similar documentary series title "The Day the Universe Changed") which covered how technological advances led to where we are.
Ready for the big shift?
Do you see any potential overlap between Smihula's Modified Kondratieff Scheme and Carroll Quigley's Ages and Stages of Empires?
Maybe. But, again, consider the way labor supply was deliberately decreased in that era. Imagine if progressive politics never happened. Imagine if it had remained possible to staff factory jobs with 10-year-olds, and to make people work 70-hour-weeks for almost no pay, without vacations or even weekends or disability pay. Imagine if people had continued to be made to work until they were dead, with no Medicare and Social Security to make it possible for the majority to step away from the job market at some point. Imagine if widespread public schooling and subsidized student loans hand't allowed for a large portion of our teens and twenty-something not to be working. In that case, you would have seen the same issue of millions more needing jobs than were needed to do the work, thanks to the way automation was multiplying the efforts of workers. But, when all those progressive policies are taking some workers out of the workforce (the very young and very hold), while reducing the annual hours you can get out of the rest, that allows for more of a balance between labor and capital, even in a situation where productivity is soaring. What changed is that we stopped further restricting labor supply, even as productivity continued to advance, leading to imbalance. In fact, labor supply increased due to the breakdown of social taboos against women working outside the home.
Do you see any potential overlap between Smihula's Modified Kondratieff Scheme and Carroll Quigley's Ages and Stages of Empires?
Full Disclosure: I didn't even know I was posting Kondratiev waves until you mentioned it.
