I know I harp on this subject a lot, but the fact remains that over the coming decades, a lot of work that has been traditionally be done by humans can, and will, be done by robots or computers. There's nothing intrinsically evil about this, but it will displace a lot of workers from their jobs, and something will need to be done about it. And no, a MyRA won't help any more than 401(k)s have, and another retraining program won't be adequate, either.
In other words, a lot of people will be permanently unemployed or underemployed in the Information Age, and we will need to take care of them one way or another. This is going to force us to rethink the concepts of labor and leisure, and how we compensate people for whom no work is available. Just telling everyone that they must provide their prospective employer with more value than a robot or a computer is pointless when robots and computers can perform their jobs faster and more efficiently than any human ever could. Not everyone will want to be an SQL coder or a derivatives trader or a Wal-Mart greeter or a hospital orderly---or any of the other "jobs of the future"---so we will need to liberate ourselves from many long-held capitalist conceits: For instance, if a person wants to seek a career as a marine biologist, she should be free to seek a career as a marine biologist regardless of whether there is any "market demand" for marine biologists. And further, she should be entitled to free higher education, and paid a decent wage that will allow her to provide for her family and save for her retirement. I know that the standard rejoinder to this is, well, if we give people this kind of freedom without the presence of markets to impose discipline, then everyone will want to be a poet or a musician, and nobody will perform any meaningful work, and everyone will just collect welfare checks without contributing anything to GDP, and the economy will collapse.
But our economy has already proven itself capable of collapsing on its own without the aid of poets and musicians, thank you, and in the bigger scheme of things, GDP is meaningless if most of the people producing it are poor and miserable, and if they have to destroy their habitat in order to keep it growing. We simply can't survive for very long if we don't replace our extractive form of consumptive capitalism with another model that recognizes the limits our environment places upon us, and which respects the rights of every human being to a decent standard of living and a comfortable old age. The Koch Brothers' right to amass $70 billion in wealth stops at my right to have a roof over my head and health care I can afford. If that makes me a communist, okay, sign me up.
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Baron V