On December 10, 2012, Nicole Gaouette writes on Bloomberg:
While technological advances, migrations, wars and other factors drove change in earlier periods, what sets the next quarter century apart is the way seven “tectonic shifts” are combining to drive change at an accelerating rate, said NIC Counselor Mathew Burrows, the report’s principle author. Those factors are: the growth of the middle class, wider access to new technologies, shifting economic power, aging populations, urbanization, growing demand forfood and water, and U.S. energy independence.
“It’s hard to wrap your mind around it, to tell you the truth; it’s just been happening at great velocity,” Burrows said in an interview with Bloomberg News discussing the 18-month research project.
While the report identifies tectonic shifts in broad terms, it fails to zero in on the tectonic shifts of technologies of production that will be disruptive to societies globally due to the resulting destruction of jobs and the devaluing of labor worker input. The issue of our time is CONCENTRATED OWNERSHIP of the non-human productive capital means of production and WHO SHOULD OWN AMERICA? Yet this is not being discussed by our political leaders, academia or the national media. 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.
President Obama stated: “What’s at stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, and secure their retirement.” As long as working people are limited by earning income solely through their labor worker wages, they will be left behind by the continued gravitation of economic bounty toward the top 1 percent of the people who own the productive capital and that the system is rigged to benefit. Working people and the middle class will continue to stagnate, resulting in a stagnated consumer economy. More troubling is that this continued stagnation will further dim the economic hopes of America’s youth, no matter what their education level. The result will have profound long-term consequences for the nation’s economic health and further limit equal earning opportunity and spread income inequality. As the need for labor decreases and the power and leverage of productive capital increases, the gap between labor workers and capital owners will increase, which will result in revolution.
The solutions are stated in the Capital Homestead Act, which advocates broadening productive capital ownership simultaneously with the FUTURE growth of the economy (http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm).
