Will Career Advancement Exist In The Future?
You know what jobs are increasing in salary and quality of work/life currently?
CEOs, corporate board members, and entrepreneurs (for the most part).
What about salary persons and working careers?
Take a look at this page. You're going to first see a grid that shows wages going up and up and up. Terrific, am I right?
Scroll down.
What you're looking for is real wages: wages in comparison to the cost of living on average.
That's not going up, up, up - it's going down, down, down.
And, yes, it's only up to January of 2020. It does not take into account the Coronapanic 2020 economic crash, which you don't need to be a Pulitzer-winning economist to know didn't help.
ETA The recent GDP plunge puts us basically on an equal economic footing with our only competition in the world: China. That's not a good sign. At all.
Ready for more bad news? Too bad, here it comes:
Andrew Yang (yes, yes, I know) has foretold of a "job-pocalypse" intensified by robotics, AI, and other innovations that seem to always benefit corporate leaders and no one else. Millions of jobs will be taken from humans, who will be left to "retrain" - and you don't just retrain for a STEMm* career when you get sacked from your factory job. Ask me how I know!
How will this play out?
Here's one take. The TL;DR, though I hope you do read it: You think government is bloated now?! Also, Keynes had bad ideas, too.
That quote does worry me. An essential human need (of decent, intelligent people anyway) is to feel like one has worth, like one is making a difference. A society of hopeless people digging holes to nowhere that won't exist tomorrow isn't one I want to live in. Do you?
Still, we've got lots of ditches to dig. By which I mean we have to disinfect each and every square inch of each and every public space, venue, and work environment in America. Roofs are without solar panels. Windmills need chicken wire box frames so birds don't fly into turbines. Food needs to be inspected and so do the places that sell them. Plastic in every form needs to be harvested from landfills and trashcans to be melted down into filament for 3D printing, or just new plastic stuff.
And - more to the point of this essay - people with people skills need to lead all this ditch digging. People need to organize these endeavors and manage getting money to the people doing the disgusting, weather-tormented work.
We have a problem in this culture, in that we overpay work with no value and don't pay work that does.
Let's change that.
Or are you busy?
*STEMm == Science, Technology, Engineering, Math...and Medicine.
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Thank you for the link to that Payscale website. The chart of real wages , i.e. adjusted for inflation, since 1960 was a real eye-opener, and very important. Our standard of living, for all but a very few, has gone down enormously over the past half century.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you, that even if it could be implemented, UBI would leave people feeling purposeless. Also, the amount of funding for UBI would reduce everyone to a bare subsistence level existence. Cory Doctorow's opinion piece is not the answer though. Who is going to pay for all the post-coronavirus cleanup and sustainability transition work that you describe? Cory says the government can just keep printing money and will pay for that labor. Yes, it can pay for labor, but where will the materials come from, those solar panels, food for people to eat, places for them to live, schools for their children, city services? That is provided by the real economy, and taxes on the income of people working in the real economy. The government can't just print money, give it to people to work, then take part of it back in taxes each year.