On January 26, 2013, Jon Evans writes on TechCrunch:
“The middle class is being hollowed out,” says James Altucher. “Economists are shifting their attention toward a […] crisis in the United States: the significant increase in income inequality,” reports the New York Times.
Think all those job losses over the last five years were just caused by the recession? No: “Most of the jobs will never return, and millions more are likely to vanish as well, say experts who study the labor market,” according to an AP report on how technology is killing middle-class jobs.
That big bulge up above? It’s moving up and to the left. America is well on the way towards having a small, highly skilled and/or highly fortunate elite, with lucrative jobs [who own income-producing productive capital); a vast underclass with casual, occasional, minimum-wage service work, if they’re lucky; and very little in between.
But it won’t be 19th century capitalism redux, there’ll be no place for neo-Marxism. That underclass won’t control the means of production. They’ll simply be irrelevant.
Why? Technology. Especially robots. The Atlantic is already wringing its hands over “The End of Labor: How to Protect Workers From the Rise of Robots.” These days robots are in factorieseverywhere–but soon enough they’ll be doing plenty of service jobs too. Meanwhile, software is eating white-collar jobs.
Well, at least the newly unemployed can still go flip burgers…oh, wait, robots are doing that, too. (And other machines can print the meat. No, really.) No wonder people with jobs increasingly feelthey have to work harder and longer.
Of course the robot manufacturers dispute this characterization. “While automation may transform the workforce and eliminate certain jobs, it also creates new kinds of jobs that are generally better paying and that require higher-skilled workers,” says the NYT.
That’s true, and the usual retort to this kind of Luddism. But what if, as I’ve been saying for more than a year, technology is now destroying jobs faster than it’s creating them? What if America has hit peak jobs?
The obvious, logical solution is for people to OWN THE MACHINES!
This new reality is the result of technological innovation and invention, tectonic shifts in the technologies of production, and an obsolute union movement stuck in job creation and “more pay for less work” instead of bargaining for employee ownership. Result: no or significantly reduced opportunity for income.
This can be accomplished by appling the logic of corporate finance, which is self-financing and asset-backed credit for productive uses to grow the economy. People invest in capital ownership on the basis that the investment will pay for itself.
The solution is not a focus on JOB CREATION but a focus on OWNERSHIP CREATION whereby EVERY American can acquire private, individual ownership in FUTURE income-producing productive capital investment without the need to limit the financing to past savings and/or requiring workers to reduce their consumption incomes to become owners.
There is a solution. The Just Third Way Master Plan for America’s future is published at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797.
The fundamental economic solution is to create income for EVERY American by simultaneously broadening private, individual ownership of FUTURE productive capital economic growth and fully paying the profit dividends to the new American owners of the income-producing capital assets of our corporations.
Support the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm
