WhiskeyTangoFoxtrot
Limp Gawd
- Joined
- Jun 4, 2013
- Messages
- 216
I almost think we need to start thinking about this. I'm not talking communism or socialism or any scary -ism. But we're seeing automation (and globalization) really come to the forefront in our lifetime (late Gen-Xer). Sure we may need a few robot repairment and coders, but honestly, is everyone intelligent enough to do that? Many of those insulting those "takers" also want to cut education spending. At the end of the day, do we want to allow the few owners of all of these companies to take more and more of the income? (In the past ten years, something like 90% of all gains in income went to the top 1%. The "bottom" 93% of Americans income actually lost income.)
Before any major world-wide reform could take place, there is the elephant in the room that would need to be dealt with first... namely the fact that the world population is already too high, and it is growing at a rate that will be impossible to sustain...
In the 1920s we hit 2 billion. That doubled to 4 billion by the 70s. We've been adding roughly a billion per decade since, and are now estimated to hit around 10 billion by the halfway point of the century.
The max "carrying capacity" off this planet has been worked out to be 5 billion people, and an "ideal" number for higher quality of life is even less at around 3-4.
As automation and technology continue to take over everything that people once did, there simply will not be enough jobs, let alone resources, to support the human race.
The population issue is already a huge part of the growing wealth gap and disappearing middle class, but no one wants to talk about it because it is such a taboo issue.
Ironically so-called "backwards" countries like China and Iran have been on top of this problem for some time, but in the West we haven't really even brought it up since the 70s and 80s.