A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology and Creating Jobs for All: The Future Belongs to Work That Is Meaningful by Charles Hugh Smith

Author:Charles Hugh Smith [Smith, Charles Hugh]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Trewe Press
Published: 2015-10-26T07:00:00+00:00

Those Benefiting from the Current World System Face a Profound Choice

I have mentioned the built-in bias of those who benefit from the patronage and privileges of the current world system: since the system works for me and my peers, it works for everyone. Those who fail to benefit simply didn’t work hard enough, etc.

There is more than a little irony in automation/commoditization eating its way up the labor food chain to the point where it is now gorging on previously protected managerial-professional jobs. The state-protected fiefdoms of higher education, healthcare and national security—long immune from competition/innovation—will either implode due to their high costs or be eaten by automation/commoditization.

Those clinging to the faith that the current world system is sustainable can only hold this faith by denying the self-destructive dynamics of the system. Simply put, the system requires growth to keep from collapsing like a supernova star: growth of payrolls, profits, debt, tax revenues and consumption.

Further expansion in an era of automation/commoditization, declining payrolls and profits, state fiefdoms, monopolies and debt saturation is simply not possible, regardless of what central banks and states set as policy. The era we are just now entering is one of Degrowth, not growth, and the current world system ceases to function in Degrowth.

If lack of credit and insufficient centralization were the problems, the global economy wouldn’t be suffering from secular stagnation.

The current world system is self-destructive in another way. As we have seen, the only possible output of this system is rising inequality and a decline in positive social roles. Rising inequality—not just in society at large, but within each class—triggers instability which brings down governments, societies, economies and nations.

For poverty is not simply a financial statistic—it is a lack of the essentials of human life, i.e. positive social roles and hope for a better future. When the privileged skim most of the gains, this creates not just financial inequality but social injustice—an injustice that rankles not just the bottom layers of society but upper class members who suffer downward mobility as their more fortunate (or well-connected) peers take most of the shrinking pie.

Rising inequality goes hand in hand with declining social mobility. When the lower and middle classes realize the ladder to wealth has few rungs left, the awareness of social injustice becomes increasingly flammable.

This sense of being left behind or left out fuels social disintegration, and as society loses its cohesion, it also loses its ability to pursue (in historian Peter Turchin’s phrase) “concerted, collective action”—the trait that binds societies and nations.

As Michael Spence and his co-authors noted in their essay Labor, Capital and Ideas in the Power Law Economy, the rewards in the Knowledge Economy will follow a power law distribution: the majority of gains will flow to the few who can provide what’s scarce, i.e. new business models and ideas.

In other words, a world in which labor and capital create little value is a world of rising inequality, and the current world system has no solution other than taxing the few winners to fund the state-protected privileged.

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