Do you have everything you want in life? I don't just mean, "do you have everything you want of what you could purchase with money today?" I mean everything you could want.
Articles like this one make me feel like there isn't a lot left to do in the world - that we're close to stopping our progress toward better living standards. If we are stopping or slowing our progress toward higher living standards, then yes efficiencies do kill jobs.
I don't see a jobless future. I see a future with a different mix of jobs. To be fair, the author does touch upon this a little as s/he is encouraging investment toward new industries. However, I don't share the author's sense that these new industries and new economies will definitionally employ fewer people. Automation and efficiencies have been seen since the industrial revolution. Two centuries in, all this automation doesn't seem to have driven unemployment to a skyward trend over the long run.
If we were pursuing a finite goal, greater efficiency would mean that we would need less labor. However, I don't believe that our quest for better lives is a finite goal. People are always talking about things they wished existed or things they wished they had. That sounds shallow, but I don't just mean commodities; I also mean medical treatments. As labor becomes freed from current tasks, it can be put toward other uses.
That doesn't mean it will be easy, but I think we're going to continue raising our standard of living and creating a better world. And that will require labor.
While I agree with you, history also shows that unemployment and wealth disparity often do rise high enough to cause massive civil unrest.
Yes, high unemployment isn't permanent or a long-term trend. That isn't really relevant though when you're talking about the prospect of blood in the streets prior to returning to decent levels.
The US seems completely arrogant in the sense that they don't seem to think this can happen to them, or that their military superiority somehow insulates them from civil unrest.
Or maybe it's not wealth disparity that causes civil unrest, but rather the absolute level of poverty on the low end. Here in the US there's no sign of any kind of generalized unrest. Far less than there was in the 70s when, according to the "disparity causes unrest" theory there should have been even less.
Seems like it would take a bit of both. If everyone is at least comfortable enough, no one will violently revolt and risk losing it (Counter-examples?). Conversely, if everyone is impoverished who do you rise up against?
Like the French Revolution example, this was caused by exploitation and abuse rather than the simple fact of someone's bank account being fatter than someone else's.
No, the French Revolution occurred because of active exploitation and abuse of the lower classes. The French people were not sitting around debating whether to spend the evening playing with their PS3s, going out for pizza, or mailing out a few more resumes. They were sitting around starving.
I can't even begin to do credit to the causes of the French Revolution in a HN post. There are a million better sources, but I think you'll find most of them will agree that "not giving the poor enough money" is not on the list of causes. Taking excessive amounts of money from the poor (and everybody else) is closer to the mark, but you still can't ignore the political climate. The lessons of the American Revolution weren't lost on the French, who came to see Louis XVI the way we saw George III.
TL,DR: the country was bankrupted by the usual zero-sum game of runaway government greed. The common people were tired of being forced to pay for stuff like Versailles ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_Versailles ) and literally starved of patience.
Nothing like this is even remotely comparable to what's happening today in the US. If anything, we're heading towards feudalism rather than revolution.
Are we not being bankrupted by run-away corporate greed? Probably not, but more importantly, will the average American think we are? That has a much greater chance to be yes.
If some sort of revolutionary spirit starts in the US, corporations will be targeted just as much as the government. Big if, but we are much closer than we were 20 years ago.
Articles like this one make me feel like there isn't a lot left to do in the world - that we're close to stopping our progress toward better living standards. If we are stopping or slowing our progress toward higher living standards, then yes efficiencies do kill jobs.
I don't see a jobless future. I see a future with a different mix of jobs. To be fair, the author does touch upon this a little as s/he is encouraging investment toward new industries. However, I don't share the author's sense that these new industries and new economies will definitionally employ fewer people. Automation and efficiencies have been seen since the industrial revolution. Two centuries in, all this automation doesn't seem to have driven unemployment to a skyward trend over the long run.
If we were pursuing a finite goal, greater efficiency would mean that we would need less labor. However, I don't believe that our quest for better lives is a finite goal. People are always talking about things they wished existed or things they wished they had. That sounds shallow, but I don't just mean commodities; I also mean medical treatments. As labor becomes freed from current tasks, it can be put toward other uses.
That doesn't mean it will be easy, but I think we're going to continue raising our standard of living and creating a better world. And that will require labor.