Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Brushing aside the unemployment figures, who get better massages than most football players, you hit on a very very important fact. Put bluntly, 50% of the population is below average in intelligence, and the average isn't a very high bar. "Grunt" jobs paying decent money are often the first to be phased out. Individuals do have limitations to the level they can achieve in intelligence, and the increasing complexity of high-tech jobs makes any idea of their getting work less and less likely.
People also have a natural tendency to want "easy" and sometimes even repetitive work. It is a biological part of the way the brain functions and not a "defect" or moral laziness.
I find that the story of the Indian railway system is a good example of what can happen. For years, the system was run on the backs of a plentiful manual labor workforce that made pennies per day. The number of workers was astronomical, in part because of the dependence on steam locomotives, in part from nepotism, in part from the abundant supply of cheap labor. While the jobs were menial, workers had at least some sense of self-worth and were not a drain on society as a whole.
With the changeover to diesel, and the demand to make the railroads profitable, and the increasing drain of funds into technology and other areas, thousands and thousands of workers were laid off. A lot of them ended up in the slums of the major cities, trying to survive.
The Romans had some high technology that they didn't fully utilize, because they recognized the need to provide jobs was more important than a mechanical device, and because "profit" wasn't the end goal of their civilization.
What a waste.
"At one of our dinners, Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton replied: “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”
World GDP 78 Trillion.
United States GDP 17.4 trillion.
22% of the world's economy
World population 7.3 billion.
United States population 319 million.
4% of the world's population.
Two measures of health are widely used in economic history: life expectancy at birth (or average length of life) and average height, which measures nutritional conditions during the growing years.
In 1850 the life expectancy of an American was 38.3 years.
In 1998, the life expectancy of an American was 76.7 years.
The average height of an American man is up more than 2 inches during that time frame.
Look at the United States living standards in the context of world history and get a grip.
I'd say in the next 50 though, we probably just become Western Europe. Nanny state, high levels of social net, since nobody will have the political capital to throttle back the oligrach crony capitalists from globalizing us back into feudalism.
Not like western Europe. They are much more egalitarian. It's easy to foment a rabid hate of "socialism" in this country, and that is being done. The middle class is pitted against the lazy poor, and I expect that to continue and get more intense. The oligarchs will increase their take while the rest fight over what's left. There will be a growing safety net, but it will be at poverty level. Their won't be any consensus movement by the masses to change things.
I'm not seeing a world war. Not for a long time anyway. The oligarchs have been and appear to be still cooperating very well. How would they profit from a war? If you want to get rid of people there are easier and less destructive (to capital) ways. But I don't expect that to happen either. More likely they will make it unprofitable and inconvenient to have children and wait a couple generations.
I think advances in virtual reality will play an important part in this. As the idled masses become marginalized, they could be effectively entertained using minimal resources. They can interact and experience all sorts of environments from the comfort of their personal pod, where they would basically live.
Quote:
Will there ever be a world where the oligarchy-prone intellectuals with sociopathic behavior don't attain positions of mass control within civilization? I don't think so, but frankly that's a question for the philosophy forum.
I know I was naive, and it appears that most people still are. I took democracy, human rights, and prosperity for granted, as some kind of natural evolution of humanity. But if you look at history you can see that these things were necessary for the oligarchs to hold and increase their power. Industrialization gave birth to consumer-capitalism. In consumer-capitalism aggregate wealth is maximized the more it is shared. Aggregate wealth and a committed population are necessary to fund a dominant military. When there was a real threat from communism this is exactly what we did. As soon as the threat dissipated they shifted to globalization and finance to drain that middle class wealth. At every step it's easy to see that policies existed to favor the oligarchs. We were just lucky that it was symbiotic for so long. For the last 40 years the great majority of the US population has gotten the shaft. That couldn't happen if there was a functional democracy. I thought there would be a wake up call after 2008, but I underestimated the effectiveness of propaganda.
It won't be like Elysium. That was a bunch of human "slaves" working for a few elite. Very few humans will have useful work 100 years from now.
So the US is the richest country in the history of the world because we are taller than we used to be?
So reading comprehension isn't your strong suit?
Two measures of health are widely used in economic history: life expectancy at birth (or average length of life) and average height, which measures nutritional conditions during the growing years.
Two measures of health are widely used in economic history: life expectancy at birth (or average length of life) and average height, which measures nutritional conditions during the growing years.
And you still don't understand why that isn't any evidence that the US is the richest country in the history of the world?
Do you think people who post doom and gloom all day on economic forums,without any understanding of economics, will be automated too?
I don't know about automated but some of them seem to be cloned.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
