Posted on 06/08/2016 4:59:49 AM PDT by expat_panama
...“Had horses had an opportunity to vote and join the Republican or Democratic Party,” Leontief wrote, they might have been able to get “the necessary appropriation from Congress.”...
...what happens if the job market stops doing the job of providing a living wage for hundreds of millions of people? How will the economy spread money around...
...if the bottom quarter of the population in the United States and Europe simply couldn’t find a job at a wage that could cover the cost of basic staples? What if smart-learning machines took out lawyers and bankers? Or even, God forbid, journalists and economists?...
...He reminisced about his undergraduate days at M.I.T. in the 1970s, when the debate over the idea of technological unemployment pitted “smart people,” exemplified by the great economist Robert Solow, and “stupid people,” “exemplified by a bunch of sociologists.”
It was stupid to think technological progress would reduce employment. If technology increased productivity — allowing companies and their workers to make more stuff in less time — people would have more money to spend on more things that would have to be made, creating jobs for other people...
...“Suppose the stupid people were right. What would it look like?” And what it looked like fits pretty well with what the world looks like today.
For large categories of workers, wages are inadequate. Many are withdrawing from the labor force altogether...
...“Maybe the stupid people weren’t quite as stupid as I thought they were,” Mr. Summers conceded. “This was at least a serious concern that had to be thought about.”
In a world in which many Americans do not work during large chunks of their lives, we might have to conceive of Social Security and disability much more broadly than we do today...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Living wage = Living cage...
What does one say to a person who basically failed at anything they put their hand to?
I daresay there are some people out there who, for whatever reason, are unable to advance beyond flipping burgers.
If you are demonstrably incompetent, you can always dig ditches.
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