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> I mean real, tangible, short term solutions to dealing with 20%+ unemployment? In a country that can't even get behind something like universal healthcare ... We'll do the same thing we did in the 30s when unemployment threatened to become socially destabilizing: we'll create work for those people. Either in the form of some WPA-ish scheme, or mandatory military/national service, perhaps. In the US it will likely be the former, because there's a sort of social collective memory of the concept in the context of the Depression. Having done it once basically greases the skids involved in doing it again. What I think people don't really appreciate is how mild recent "depressions" have been relative to the 1930s; we haven't seen 20+% unemployment in this country since WWII, so lots of things seem politically impossible. They aren't; it's just that the necessary conditions for them don't exist right now. But if we were facing the same set of problems again, there's no reason to think that we wouldn't reach for the same set of solutions. Though personally, I don't see any of the automation technologies that are on the horizon right now leading to 20% unemployment. Most automation technologies have typically underperformed expectations in terms of headcount reduction, with niche exceptions in certain industries. I suspect automation will follow that pattern: you'll see a few industries or job functions get decimated (long-haul truck drivers, potentially), a bunch of new jobs get invented (remote backup driver, automation systems technician, etc.), and a bunch of other jobs get reshuffled, expanding or contracting based on costs (lower transportation costs might lead to more shipments, more need for loading/unloading workers, supply chain management types, etc.). Plus, the time horizon on many of these systems is approaching a significant fraction of a person's career. Someone in middle age, driving an OTR truck today, probably won't have too many problems riding that particular horse all the way into the sunset of their retirement (although at the end of their career they might feel a bit like John Henry, looking for those particular jobs that the machines have a hard time with). Someone who's 18 and looking for a career ought to beware, though. And it would be fair to ensure that public funds for education and job training are matched to expected job availability in the future -- it seems too often that we train young people for jobs that are on the verge of disappearance, and then blame them for taking the bait. That obviously shouldn't happen. |