The work on technology to take the place of policy is proceeding, thought slower than the leadership would prefer.
We've been reshaping the system to redistribute trillions to capital owners via government IOUs that will eventually come due. Inevitably, this will be "solved" by cutting benefits to workers while insisting no other solution could possibly exist.
Like, you know, undoing these relatively recent handouts to the ultra rich and restructuring policy to the benefit of workers.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3198075/
In fact according to government data:
>U.S. counties with poverty rates exceeding 35% have age-adjusted obesity rates substantially higher than wealthy counties.
Being fat is actually a disease of the poor.
If we don't spend the next few decades skating by while the currency is debased under our noses, I assume its because there's a much more severe and tragic response.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/222127/quarterly-corpora...
So next we automate the bejeebus out of this economy with AI robots and Elon believes it grows 3x in under five years. Splendid. But if a consumer-driven economy has no payrolls, it eventually has no buyers. It just seems to me that ultimately, billionaires and investors cannot decouple themselves from the masses... but maybe it's a game of get mine before the system collapses?
so yeah, billionaires without compute or robots will join the permanent underclass
edoceo•32m ago
Top earnings come from the support of 1000s of participants with lesser earnings. This is an unhealthy economic trend. It's more than a stagnation risk.
Issues like these are created in a short term but take comparatively longer to correct.
sixdimensional•25m ago
The world is a very different place than it was in the early 20th century, but at the same time, "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it".
I say this not to be a "doomer". I say this because those forces I mentioned above were very real and we have to keep our eyes wide open.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression
ProllyInfamous•18m ago
Pay peanuts, expect a circus.
At this point, we'll either have universal UBI -=or=- ongoing war.
Unfortunately, the latter is more profitable, so... the future is by design, probably.
kevin_thibedeau•9m ago
motbus3•9m ago