"What's causing this decline in workers' ability to claim more of the nation's wealth? It's certainly not that they're less productive: According to a Wall Street Journal survey of the S&P 500 (listing the nation's largest publicly traded companies), revenues per worker, which were $378,000 in 2007, grew to $420,000 in 2010, thanks to growing worker productivity. Businesses now produce more with fewer employees, yet even those workers who've managed to keep their jobs haven't seen their wages rise."
Where have all the nation's increase in profits gone? To the top 10%, especially the top 1%.
Abundance of basic goods and services for all is impossible in the super wasteful, hyperconsumption-hyperproduction treadmill economy.
Why so? It's because the very large majority of workers have no other choice than to keep busy producing all the superfluous stuff that can be made to sell for top dollar, to people like themselves who spend increasing amounts of their waking hours at work, and who then buy all this stuff as compensation for the fact that they no longer have enough leisure time and education to develop and enjoy their full humanity, much less spend enough time with their children. With so many people working such long hours (on the 'treadmill' so to speak), in an economy where robots, automation, computer applications and foreign workers are doing an ever larger share of whatever work remains available, there is simply no longer enough decently paid work to go around. The result is a continuing reduction of the number of people in America's great middle class, many of whom are slipping into poverty.
If everyone had the right to work a 30-hr week without losing any benefits, many would jump at that opportunity, and existing work would soon be distributed much more evenly, as it spreads out among much larger numbers of people. But the 30-hr week may be a long time coming, since those who currently 'own' most of our members of Congress would lose money bigtime with this kind of transition. Therefore, some people (an ever growing number) are going to continue to get left out, i.e. they will be denied adequately paid work. This means growing poverty in a world of plenty.
Artificially maintained scarcity of basic goods and services, deriving from the abnormally low incomes of the ever larger numbers of the poor, is inevitable in this kind of an economy. Why so? Because owners of businesses do NOT view reducing production costs as being a means of increasing the affordability of their products for one and all. Rather, they reduce costs purely as a means of increasing profits when competition is tight and they need to either regain or keep their market share. In other words, the only reason you see price reductions is because of the competition occurring in any given industry, as each company works to undercut the prices of the other.
But no matter how cheap goods and services might become, at some point the consumption deficiency (i.e. the inadequate amounts of consumption that result from growing numbers of people being kept unemployed and underemployed, by way of ever increasing automation), will override whatever degree of affordability is being generated by the lower-cost products being created. In other words, if the wages of too many consumers fall too much, the amount of stuff that will be purchased will not be enough to prevent growing numbers of layoffs.
Also keep in mind that all it takes is a 25-30% unemployment rate to destabilize society to the point of mass outrage, disorder, riots and chaos. Therefore, the main question isn't, "Will we automate almost everything?" The main question is, "At what point will the ever growing efficiency of applied automation and new software apps produce 'enough' unemployment to cause this kind of social destabilization plus a debilitating loss of economic growth, accompanied by a great loss of those jobs that have come to depend on continued economic growth?"
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