My nephew is a robotics engineer. He was visiting a few months back. He works remotely, usually, and was working from my house. He's an intense guy and was working 12-14 hour days in this zone of complete, intense concentration.
It made me think that we ARE reaching a time when there will not be enough "work" for everyone. But, guys like my nephew will still be needed.
We are seeing the creation of a large entitlement class already. People who will and have never really worked. People who have left the workforce who will never return. We are seeing the beginnings of those people being sustained by a guaranteed income by the "state" or the ever smaller group of taxpayers.
How's that work? How and why do guys like my nephew continue to do what they do?
Very simple, in theory. The free market, which has really only existed anywhere for the last few hundred years but has spread in various forms around the world, is essentially an economy of scarcity.
People are rewarded by the extent to which they provide scarce resources others want. If the only resource you provide is one for which there is more supply than demand, you’ll make little money, if you have a job at all.
If the resource you provide is in higher demand than supply, your compensation soars. There is only one Rush Limbaugh. He makes a lot of money because tens of millions of people want what only he can provide.
Meanwhile, millions of people drive vehicles as their employment. Many of these jobs are going to disappear in the next few years. Most of the people thereby left unemployed will not be able to do the “new jobs” and in fact will not be capable of being trained to do so.
Extrapolate to all other areas of the economy.
The free market has had a hell of a run, and it’s produced enormous good for humanity. But, sadly, I expect it’s in the early stages of being counter-productive for most people.
With more and more people competing for the few jobs those on the mid to low end of the IQ scale can go, compensation will obviously drop. Supply and demand. It will correspondingly soar for those capable of doing the jobs for which demand still exceeds supply. Essentially all of which require high intelligence.
This means that more and more people will be “falling out the bottom” of the job market. No demand for anything they’re capable of doing.
This will not, IMO, mean poverty. The world of the future will be so productive there will be more than enough to go around. But do we leave control of the economy or even the political system in control of those increasingly few who are still in economic demand?
If not, it there any other other way to organize the economy other than by government redistribution?
How's that work? How and why do guys like my nephew continue to do what they do?
Our Socialist polices are driving a lot of the automation because of all the costs for wages, benefits, union rules and cost to comply with draconian government labor laws make employees and human labor undesirable.
Our social polices are killing small business which accounts for most of the dynamic job growth and the large companies use their economies of scale to automate to reduce labor costs.
Manufacturing IS coming back America but jobs are not keeping pace because manufacturers are showing to automate their new production to cut back on employee related expenses mandated by the Democrats and Obama. The bottom line is that Obama and the Democrats had priced human labor out of the market by adding cost huge overheads onto employee wages , insane and predatory workplace safety rules have both increased the cost of labors and generated ridiculous amounts liability for employers that they have replaced people with robots on some job functions just to avoid injuries, union obstruction, low quality of work and productivity destruction adds to the FUBAR of it all and finally the Human Resource paper work burdens and boondoggle put the nail in the coffin for human labor.
Europe is actually well ahead of America in automation because they have had these socialist work rules for decades.
The future is going to be in the skilled trades, from installing and upgrading servers to maintaining power systems to plumbing and building repairs.
The work can’t be done by robots, nor can it be done by unskilled immigrants walking across the border.
so who is the average private sector worker,most who do not work for big companies with lavish payouts, supposed to be mad at?....
I'm mad at both groups.....the gimedats get a relative pittance compared to some glorified secretary in Wash DC....