On January 21, 2013, Marin N. Baily and James Manyika write on Project Syndicate.org:
Once upon a time, ambitious young people with a knack for math and science went to work in manufacturing. They designed planes, computers, and furniture, figured out how to lay out an assembly line, helped to make new cars faster and refrigerators more efficient, pushed the limits of computer chips, and invented new medicines. But, as the role of manufacturing diminished in advanced economies, the brightest talents tended to gravitate to finance and other service fields that were growing rapidly – and paying well.
But here’s some news: global manufacturing has the potential to stage a renaissance and once again become a career of choice for the most talented. Of course, any manufacturing rebound in the advanced economies will not generate mass employment; but it will create many high-quality jobs. There will be more demand for software programmers, engineers, designers, robotics experts, data analytics specialists, and myriad other professional and service-type positions. In some manufacturing sectors, more such people may be hired than will be added on the factory floor.
While this is a potential for FUTURE employment opportunity, such high-tech jobs will not generate mass employment. And unless we focus on OWNERSHIP CREATION, 0ur scientists, engineers, and executive managers, who are not owners themselves, except for those in the highest employed positions, will continue to be encouraged to work to destroy employment by making the capital owner more productive. How much employment can be destroyed by substituting machines for people is a measure of their success––always focused on producing at the lowest cost. Only the people who already own productive capital will continue to be the beneficiaries of their work, as they systematically concentrate more and more capital ownership in their stationary 1 percent ranks. Yet the 1 percent are not the people who do the overwhelming consuming. The result is the consumer populous is not able to get the money to buy the products and services produced as a result of substituting machines for people. And yet you can’t have mass production without mass human consumption. It is the exponential disassociation of production and consumption that is the problem in the United States economy, and the reason that ordinary citizens must gain access to productive capital ownership to improve their economic well-being.
This is why it is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL that Americans WAKE UP and realize that the FUTURE is one of technological unemployment no matter how many high-tech jobs are created. Private sector job creation in numbers that match the pool of people willing and able to work is constantly being eroded by physical productive capital’s ever increasing role.
This is the NEW REALITY! The obvious, logical solution is for people to OWN THE MACHINES and non-human means of production that result from technology.
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
