The Facts of Life
Simple economics
1 technology has increasingly made hiring people less profitable than machines.
2 Of the jobs that are left cheap transportation has made it more profitable to offshore manufacturing to countries where the labor can be hired dirt cheap and ship it to countries with the money to buy the products
3 in the United States and in other countries housing has become an investment strategy for non-local owners. Every time a profit is made by the wealthy investors the profit comes from from those buying and renting the houses paying the costs in higher rents and mortgages leading to a variety of problems in their life including stress leading to health issues.
4 climate change and other environmental issues are in the process of causing great disruption to the economy
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So the question becomes: is it the goal of our society that all should have a chance to prosper or are we accepting of a society with a built-in large number of people who will at best struggle and in many cases fall off the edge, be pushed off the edge to be more accurate. It's really that simple and of course the details of how best to accomplish this are a matter for debate.
If indeed we do believe in creating a society where everyone has a chance to prosper then we have to accept that the basic math of the economy and the environment and the changes to both mean that we need to fundamentally change the way we do things. What those changes are is a matter of debate.
What is not a matter for debate is that the system we have now is structurally built to not work for large numbers of people.
1 technology has increasingly made hiring people less profitable than machines.
2 Of the jobs that are left cheap transportation has made it more profitable to offshore manufacturing to countries where the labor can be hired dirt cheap and ship it to countries with the money to buy the products
3 in the United States and in other countries housing has become an investment strategy for non-local owners. Every time a profit is made by the wealthy investors the profit comes from from those buying and renting the houses paying the costs in higher rents and mortgages leading to a variety of problems in their life including stress leading to health issues.
4 climate change and other environmental issues are in the process of causing great disruption to the economy
---
So the question becomes: is it the goal of our society that all should have a chance to prosper or are we accepting of a society with a built-in large number of people who will at best struggle and in many cases fall off the edge, be pushed off the edge to be more accurate. It's really that simple and of course the details of how best to accomplish this are a matter for debate.
If indeed we do believe in creating a society where everyone has a chance to prosper then we have to accept that the basic math of the economy and the environment and the changes to both mean that we need to fundamentally change the way we do things. What those changes are is a matter of debate.
What is not a matter for debate is that the system we have now is structurally built to not work for large numbers of people.