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Is technology to blame for chronic unemployment?
European researchers say some apps on Android smartphones leave passwords, bank accounts, credit cards, and other sensitive info vulnerable to theft.
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Most of us assume that at some point the economy is going to kick into gear. That unemployment will eventually drop below 6 percent, and that job creation will return to its previous clip of 200,000 a month. But what if we're stuck at a new normal of high unemployment and low job growth? It's possible because technology might just have gotten the best of us.
It used to be that new technologies generated lots of new jobs for those displaced from old ones. After farms were mechanized, Americans moved to factories. After manufacturing declined -- in part due to technologies that dramatically cut the cost of shipping goods -- we moved into services.
But new technologies have been eating away at services, too. Gas station attendants are long gone and telephone operators and bank tellers aren't far behind. Endangered too are office clerks and secretaries, publishing jobs, and people providing any expertise or information that can now be digitized into a computer.
We still have plenty of jobs in retail sales, education, and health care -- but these are also among the least efficient parts of our economy and pressure is building to cut costs. Here again, technology is leading the way. In the next decade, it seems likely that many retail sales workers will be being replaced by online sales. We're about to see a wave of online courses and classrooms -- supplanting some teachers.
Health care has to become more efficient. So patients will carry their own medical files on memory sticks. We'll also have personal health apps, allowing us to self-diagnose -- even measuring our own blood pressure and other vital signs.
All this is good for us as consumers -- but as workers we're putting ourselves out of business. At this rate, 50 years from now, a tiny machine may satisfy all our needs. Call it the "iEverything." The only problem: none of us will be able to afford it because we'll all be unemployed.
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FINALLY, Robert Reich addresses the impact of tectonic shifts in the technologies of production that I and others have been exposing for decades. It is this never-ending shift that results in job destruction and job degradation (sub-standard wages and salaries).
The nation's priority needs to be implementing policies to broadened private, individual ownership of FUTURE productive capital simultaneously with the financing of the economy's growth.
The proposed reforms that I and others are advocating would grow a truly just and free enterprise economy, creating millions of private sector jobs and turning this country into a nation where every child, woman and man could become a capital owner, without redistributing property from current owners. See Louis Kelso and Mortimer Adler's 1958 book The Capitalist Manifesto and their 1961 book The New Capitalists: A Proposal For Freeing Economic Growth From The Slavery Of (Past) Savings (download free at http://www.cesj.org/cesjsitemap.html).
Our proposed systemic reforms to the tax, monetary, finance, inheritance, labor and welfare systems are based on the sound moral, political and economic principles espoused by Kelso and Adler and supported by the great thinkers of the past. This new vision would offer a truly genuine "Second American Revolution" of radically centrist "bottom-up" ideas based on the inherent dignity of every human person. It took a civil war to eliminate the institution of human slavery, the original sin of this great nation. Our challenge today is to eliminate wage slavery, welfare slavery and debt slavery, while minimizing charity slavery.
Such a new strategic goal would be guided by universal principles of economic and social justice that would lift American political debates from the politics of greed (the right) or those of envy (the left). Such a new goal would restore America's moral leadership in the world. How? By uniting all Americans across today's ideological spectrum, from far right to far left, behind a "solution" that would systematically create a truly new constituency working together to build a more economically just, high tech, sustainable growth economy. Uniquely such a just free market economy could be achieved without depriving current capitalists of property rights over their existing assets and would radically reduce and eventually eliminate government redistribution of income.
Please see my article "Democratic Capitalism And Binary Economics: Solutions For A Troubled Nation and Economy" at http://foreconomicjustice.com/11/economic-justice/ or follow me on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/pages/For-Economic-Justice/347893098576250 and http://www.facebook.com/editorgary
Also follow the Center for Economic and Social Justice at www.cesj.org and http://capitalhomestead.org/ Join the OWN Team at http://capitalhomestead.org/group/the-on-team
Also see The Kelso Institute at http://www.kelsoinstitute.org/
Like the Just Third Way Group at http://www.facebook.com/groups/Justthirdway/
Support the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm
Join the OWN Team to advocate OWNERSHIP CREATION at http://capitalhomestead.org/group/the-own-team The only commitment is to participate in the Weekly Action Point, which is usually just a Facebook post. Other activities are strictly voluntary!
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