[nercht12]

>> I believe that the best leverage workers of the world can have is the ability to live a decent life without the threat of starvation or extreme poverty. This dream is attainable, and worth planning for and building towards as a species.

What do you mean by "ability"? Opportunity? I don't see how any particular economic status of anyone can be guaranteed with regards to what you're saying.

How I see it: The rich get richer and the poor, poorer. Once the rich have all the wealth, they go elsewhere with it. Corporations move to Singapore to save money. Automation will only benefit those who own it. Once things are automated, most people will lose their jobs and won't be able to afford even the things that are produced by automation. The rich aren't going to share, and if they do, they do it with strings attached so they can manipulate the spending and promote their own agendas (which is what they do now anyways).

The biggest problem is simply human selfishness. Because of it, there will never be peace. There will always be people seeking more than they need, always seeking their own survival over that of others, always seeking to crush others to give themselves a boost physically/economically/egotistically/etc. There will never be world peace as long as people are selfish, which basically makes world peace a pipe dream. Sorry to step on toes, but that's life.

[simonh]

> The rich get richer and the poor, poorer.

How do you explain the massive transformation of China from a backward rural basket case, to a dynamic modern manufacturing led economy in which industrial employment and industrial labour wages have both rocketed in the last 20 years?

That has come at a cost. Manufacturing really has transferred from the West to the East. Yet the West doesn't have mass unemployment and job vacancies for skilled workers are at an all-time high in the West.

The problem is that low skilled jobs have gone East and the West is moving up into high value services jobs, but our training and education systems have adapted too slowly to bring our worker pools along for the ride. The answer is not to turn back the clock, it's to ride the economic wave and up-skill our labor pool because too many people in the west are being left behind in unskilled jobs, when actually there are plenty of skilled job vacancies available compared the the actual number of unemployed.

[nercht12]

> How do you explain the massive transformation of China from a backward rural basket case.

It's not as if wealth doesn't get redistributed for a variety of reasons (war, theft, taxes, communism, etc.). But the reality is, any economic system left to its own ends will inevitably result in a few gaining manipulating the system to gain the majority of the wealth while the rest fall farther behind. The discrepancy in the West hasn't been noticed because the economic "pie" so-to-speak has simply grown larger. When the pie stops growing, you'll start to see the effects of the inevitable trend start to appear.

> The answer is not to turn back the clock, it's to ride the economic wave and up-skill our labor pool because too many people in the west are being left behind in unskilled jobs, when actually there are plenty of skilled job vacancies available compared the the actual number of unemployed.

I agree, turning back the clock isn't the solution. However, I'm also aware that the situation isn't going to improve for the majority of people in the west. It's easy to say "up our game" but how much? Most people in the US now have bachelors. That was SUPPOSED to get you in the door to business. What happened? The bar went up. Now people are stuck with debt they can't get out of to loan sharks who won't forgive. Even if we erased all that, would that fix the problem? No, because the skill level required for entry is too high. Why? It's not merely because companies couldn't just hire from a number of talented candidates to do the job, it's because companies want to make money, and they're trying to do it by only investing in candidates they believe will bring them money (which means the experts), no investment in training. Every dime they spend towards training candidates is a dime their competitor gains when their newly-trained employees leave. Companies each sit on their own money source, and at the top of the economic chain are the billionaires with investments in all these companies and siphoning out penny after penny until - should time be on their side - they have it all. That won't happen in the long run for the aforementioned reasons (war, taxes, etc.), but you can't deny it would be fantastic to be in a personal financial situation where "money is no object".

Notably, a number of people can't actually meet the bar, esp. the handicapped and those who just don't have a knack for technical things. What are they supposed to do? Their jobs will eventually be replaced by robots, and should we get to that point, even those "middle class Chinese" will eventually start to see their wages reduced from 2 yen to nothing.

So yeah, there are plenty of jobs, but they won't be filled. People (esp. the rich) want people to make them money, not people who don't. Of course, perhaps I've overly simplified all this for the sake of brevity and haven't ironed out the argument to your satisfaction, but I trust you can find some unemployed people - skilled or not - and ask how their job search is going.