hard time getting here, but job peaks?

I've had the devil's own time finding an opportunity to write here. Seems like my ever waking hour is accounted for someplace else -- either job, or freelancing, or working for Belfort and Bastion (check it out, by the way. New books coming.)

But I did find the time to at least glace at this article by Jon Evans. Very interesting piece. Argues that we are moving toward a jobless society (hard to argue with that) and that unless we learn how to deal with it -- that is, how to give people incomes and self-respect when they aren't working -- then we are in deep trouble.

The final lines sum it up nicely, "If it’s not solved, then in the coming decades you can expect a self-perpetuating privileged elite to accrue more and more of the wealth generated by software and robots, telling themselves that they’re carrying the entire world on their backs, Ayn Rand heroes come to life, while all the lazy jobless “takers” live off the fruits of their labor. Meanwhile, as the unemployed masses grow ever more frustrated and resentful, the Occupy protests will be a mere candle flame next to the conflagrations to come. It’s hard to see how that turns into a post-scarcity society. Something big will need to change."

employment crisis...for whom?

Saw an interesting review by Guillermo Santamaria of Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee's new book Race Against The Machine at H+ (see below). The book deals with the current unemployment problem and the changes in the economy that are causing it -- particularly the automation of so much labor.

In my comment I wrote that it must be difficult to write about the current employment crisis (or, indeed, any crisis). Naturally, we tend to interpret events from our own perspective. If developments seem to benefit our own sort of person, then the future appears dark in the short run and bright in the long. if they do not, however, then the future is uniformly horrible.

The question, of course, is whether we know who the developments in question will really benefit. Automation, for instance, is putting much of the industrial workforce out of business. But, I've heard it argued that increasingly sophisticated software is having the same effect on white collar workers. The managerial, service, and "human skills" workers may not, in the long run, be the winners they think they are.

http://hplusmagazine.com/2012/01/29/book-review-race-against-the-machines/