"But overall, the problem here is not technology: it's capitalism."
Right. Capitalism is designed to maximize shareholder value. A higher standard of living for workers was a side effect. Was.
No other country has a working solution. Japan had their real estate collapse 18 years before the US, and never fully came back. Japan is an innovative country, yet they couldn't crack this problem. They tried heavy infrastructure spending to pump up the economy, and it helped a little.
The golden age for American workers coincides with the Communist period in Russia. That's not coincidental. From the 1920s to the 1970s, capitalism had competition. There was real fear among capitalists that if capitalism didn't deliver the goods to workers, the workers would vote to socialize industries. Britain did that, with the government running the coal, steel, railroad, airline, electric power, and telecommunications industries. It wasn't an unreasonable fear.
So the US had the New Deal under Roosevelt, and strong unions. After WWII, unions worked to keep wages high. There were explicit arrangements in the auto industry requiring wages to track productivity, so workers kept up. The auto and steel industries set the pattern for the rest of the economy. In the 1950s and 1960s, the USSR started to look like a serious economic competitor. The USSR built an atomic bomb, H-bombs, nuclear submarines, and a space program. Communism as a system looked like a threat.
That ended in the early 1980s, as the USSR stopped believing in its own "workers paradise". With fear of competition gone, capitalism could take a much harder line on its workers. It took a while, but now employers can do pretty much anything they want to without fear of retribution.
I'd say China and India today are just as big of a threat, if not bigger, as the USSR was. Why don't we see this same competition now? Is it because it's not sensationalized? Because no one takes it seriously for some reason this time around? I honestly don't know, but if what we need is a worthy competitor, there are two just waiting for a slip up.
It seems especially dire when you consider that the western world's main export isn't a physical good, and it basically all hinges on the fact that the smart and able are allowed to succeed and produce "value", where as the smart and able in poorer countries don't have those opportunities. India and China make up half the world's population, an order of magnitude larger than the "western world", so I expect that they have far, far more able and smart people there just waiting to take the opportunity if it's given.
I think that when (if?) those countries catch up to our "modern standard of living", they'll quickly leave us in the dust.
At the same time I'm not sure it's quite as possible in such a connected world to have a competitor as isolated as the USSR was. The economy is far more global and intertwined than it was, maybe we'll all just boost the worldwide standard of living with cooperation instead of competition?
I honestly don't know what's going to happen down the road (and hold no strong ideas of what might, all outcomes seem equally as likely/unlikely to me), and neither does anyone else, but I wouldn't be surprised if the world doesn't change all that much. Factories have closed down, jobs were lost, and people ended up in a different kind of factory, now sitting at a desk staring at a computer instead of a machine on an assembly line.
Many people (here on HN especially) seem to think that jobs will disappear and not be replaced. In 1930, no one could have accurately predicted the world 100 years later. When machines started replacing factory workers, I doubt anyone would have expected us to all be staring at glorified tv screens and while banging away on our typewriters as a job, and that the some of the biggest companies around wouldn't actually sell anything physical, yet here we are. So who's to say that the next step is indeed something like basic income, instead of yet another version of the same factory? What if the next change in type of employment seems just as ridiculous and unimaginable today as today's world would to someone 100, even 50, years ago? Job Opening: Virtual Reality Tour Guide, must have at least 5 years experience in navigating WorldBook.com's(Facebook's VR world, launched 3 years ago) .
I'd agree easily that China and India are at least a big of a threat to the US position as top economy. There's nothing, other than inertia and maybe cultural influences, maintaining the status quo. I say maybe, because I don't know a lot about Indian and Chinese culture.
I feel that there's not a lot of concern here about the possibility of falling behind, because we're all entertained to a degree where we just don't care. So many people are always entertained by television, radio, music, sports, infotainment, and as a result they barely take their education, families, and work seriously, let alone global balance.
If we lost the 24/7 entertainment, we'd see a shift in perception and an increase in competitiveness and motivation.
Right. Capitalism is designed to maximize shareholder value. A higher standard of living for workers was a side effect. Was.
No other country has a working solution. Japan had their real estate collapse 18 years before the US, and never fully came back. Japan is an innovative country, yet they couldn't crack this problem. They tried heavy infrastructure spending to pump up the economy, and it helped a little.
The golden age for American workers coincides with the Communist period in Russia. That's not coincidental. From the 1920s to the 1970s, capitalism had competition. There was real fear among capitalists that if capitalism didn't deliver the goods to workers, the workers would vote to socialize industries. Britain did that, with the government running the coal, steel, railroad, airline, electric power, and telecommunications industries. It wasn't an unreasonable fear.
So the US had the New Deal under Roosevelt, and strong unions. After WWII, unions worked to keep wages high. There were explicit arrangements in the auto industry requiring wages to track productivity, so workers kept up. The auto and steel industries set the pattern for the rest of the economy. In the 1950s and 1960s, the USSR started to look like a serious economic competitor. The USSR built an atomic bomb, H-bombs, nuclear submarines, and a space program. Communism as a system looked like a threat.
That ended in the early 1980s, as the USSR stopped believing in its own "workers paradise". With fear of competition gone, capitalism could take a much harder line on its workers. It took a while, but now employers can do pretty much anything they want to without fear of retribution.