Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
There's isn't any doubt that in the tug of war between capital and labour, capital has yanked the rope right out of the hands of labour and is waving it triumphantly. Thomas Picketty has documented the dominance of capital, and its increasing concentration, in his groundbreaking book Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
Not only is capital concentrating in fewer hands, we are witnesses a steep rise in automation, and a matching decline in the requirements of labour. The drivers of those huge trucks up in Fort Mac who are being replaced by automatic trucks are just the beginning. We're approaching an era when a great portion of adults simply will not be needed by the economy. But as you note, who will buy things if half of the population isn't making money? Hopefully the captains of industry will realize they need customers to sell to. |
With more and more professions going by the way side due to automation, there will either have to be huge expanding areas of employment in different fields (say like the tech sector) or some sort of "post capitalist" society will have to form. An example would be the guaranteed income thing that was debated in Switzerland (Can't remember if they passed it or not).
Even manufacturing a lot of goods will go by the wayside if 3-D printing technology sees similar jumps in quality over the next 10 years.
Self driving vehicles will put tons of people out of work, from cabbies, to truck drivers of all kinds. Realistically, cashiers are not really going to be needed either and we're starting to see some of those jobs getting replaced by computers as well.
It will be interesting to see how things unfold over the next 10-20 years and how society will adapt.