4 Calamities Destroying America's Economy Being Ignored by Elites

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/4-calamities-destroying-americas-economy-being-ignored-elites

***SNIP

1. Automation: The number of jobs that have been automated out of existence in the last 30 years is astronomical. Any effort to enumerate them would be silly. Useful, on the contrary, are perhaps a few hints of the kinds of automation that are still in the future, but nonetheless just around the corner. Observe what is happening in retail – Amazon.com, and more generally in the service sector, in banks and offices; but beyond that consider the near future of robotics, and close to that the potential of self-driving cars, and of course the galloping field of fabricators. Automation so far has only been the first breeze of an approaching hurricane.

2. A second colossal cause is globalization. Despite the nonstop discussion of that topic its basic significance is still largely misunderstood. That factory work is outsourced to lower wage countries is a belittling phrase; more accurate is the contrast between the former monopoly of a very few colonial powers and the now prevailing condition where all countries everywhere — even the Central African Republic and Borneo and Mongolia — are indevelopment. In other words, in all countries people are looking for jobs. Thus the supply of labor has burst through all bounds! This in turn means that the value of unskilled work has plummeted beyond human sustainability much less economic growth.

3. Environmental degradation is growing. The depletion of natural resources is directly caused by fruitless efforts to stem unemployment. Unemployment threatens to grow continuously and the only response we have so far marshaled is economic growth, which self-evidently is coupled to the depletion of our resources.

4. The fourth mega-force that escalates inequality everywhere is the industrialization of farming. Throughout the millennia of the Agricultural epoch approximately 75% of the population lived and worked on farms. That percentage only started to gallop away from this ratio when farming became mechanized. However, in the brief period of less than 200 years a breathtaking transformation has taken place. Worldwide 70% of farmers have been driven from their work and their land. In country after country the percentage of people still working and living on farms has thundered downwards so that it is now in some countries only about 4%. On some continents that human migration is still in its headlong tilt: but as villages die, the former farmers do not find work; they are absorbed in slums and sink down in the morass of extreme poverty, violence, crime, prostitution and drugs.

[OffWithTheirHeads]

1. We all live in district 9 now.

[Sherman A1]

2. Precisely

I would add to reason #1 automation. The increased reliance upon and use of "standard procedures and standard policy" for the next generation of workers. It appears that employers do not want their workers to make decisions when necessary based upon a combination of procedure, policy, education, the wants and needs of the customer and experience, but rather automatons that simply follow the rules (whatever they are). It appears that the upcoming workplace is based upon the workforce not having experience and will be forced to default to procedures and policy on a regular basis with the only soon to be limited knowledge and experience being vested in those in management.

Just my observations....

[jtuck004]

3. "...there is no circling back to a former “better” time." < Wonder how many will die while others

insist on waiting for it instead of figuring out that new future.

And I don't think the title gives the "Elites" enough credit for creating or exacerbating those very forces.

[HughBeaumont]

4. Alternet misspelled "exacerbated" . . . .

[Progressive dog]

5. We can all be equally destitute,

there is a past to go back to.