Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 996-998

Today, however, a much darker picture of the effects of technology on labor is emerging. In this picture, highly educated workers are as likely as less educated workers to find themselves displaced and devalued, and pushing for more education may create as many problems as it solves.
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Even a quick scan of the report’s list suggests that some of the victims of disruption will be workers who are currently considered highly skilled, and who invested a lot of time and money in acquiring those skills. For example, the report suggests that we’re going to be seeing a lot of “automation of knowledge work,” with software doing things that used to require college graduates. Advanced robotics could further diminish employment in manufacturing, but it could also replace some medical professionals.


 Education, then, is no longer the answer to rising inequality, if it ever was (which I doubt).

So what is the answer? If the picture I’ve drawn is at all right, the only way we could have anything resembling a middle-class society — a society in which ordinary citizens have a reasonable assurance of maintaining a decent life as long as they work hard and play by the rules — would be by having a strong social safety net, one that guarantees not just health care but a minimum income, too.
Sympathy for the Luddites
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times
Published: June 13, 2013
[emphasis JS]

According to a Pew Foundation survey, “nearly a quarter of Americans (24%) say they had trouble putting food on the table in the past 12 month revealing a painful level of deprivation and family trauma despite the U.S.  being the richest country in the world.

In early 2013, Oxfam reported that the fortunes made by the world’s 100 richest people over the course of 2012 – roughly $240 billion – would be enough to lift the world’s poorest people out of poverty four times over.
Andrew Gavin Marshall
Global Power Project, Part 1: Exposing the Transnational Capitalist Class
 [emphasis JS]

The science fiction of the 40's and 50's and 60's assumed something like Dr K's answer, but more so. Typically, they presented a future in which everyone was issued a base income, enough to live on, and they were free to live on that or work for more. This made work a choice, and required potential employers to offer enough to get someone to make that choice, and treat them well enough that the workers did not change their minds about that.

We have never actually done that, but it was the common answer of those who thought about it for about two generations.

This was a model openly discussed in the campaign of George McGovern in 1968. It has nearly disappeared from our political life after that crushing defeat, and even from most literature after that.

It is still the only long term answer. A society that does not do this will become a non-functional dystopian society that will be too weak to survive against healthier societies that have the consent and support of their governed.
Mark Thomason
Clawson, MI
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Sympathy for the Luddites
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times
Published: June 13, 2013