So far for the end of the industrial revolution and our current point in the technology revolution, many of the 1st world industrialized nations are turning into welfare states with no real end in sight to the growing numbers on their roles. I see no vision by any of these countries about where this is supposed to end up. Or what is next to insure people can still be productive and earn the funds to pay for the products companies need purchased to keep the whole Catch-22 circle moving. Unless governments look at welfare now like IT hardware companies during the DotCom boom who gave their customers loans to buy their products. We know how that worked out.
You see fewer productive citizens paying more taxes as a consequence of modernization. Though in Scandinavian countries and the British isles, they have enjoyed a short hiatus due to their sea oil profits which will not last much longer. But, did make it possible to have very generous state welfare benefits. Wonder what happens to those countries when the sea oil runs out?
With robotics supplanting and manual labor factory jobs moving out of the 1st world western nations, how do you survive as service dominated nations? Service produces nothing and can be replaced by computer programs and robots like Japan is pushing the envelope with. The governments cannot continue to punish the dwindling supply of taxpayers with nothing to replace tax revenue sources or factory jobs to get citizens off the welfare roles. A good example is American Social Security where originally you had about 60 employed factory workers paying in to every one retired using those benefits. Today, maybe two employed workers paying in to every person receiving benefits.
It's also a canard to say people just have to get an education and make themselves competitive. What do you do with everyone else who has an education but didn't make the cut, and all those who just don't have it much past a High School education? It's a fallacy to keep saying they have to get educated in countries that mandate education by law until 12th grade. You have a very effective process to level out your population and in the end, it comes out the same every time.
80% needing factory or manual jobs with 20% highly competitive and or creating companies. Many of those new companies in the 1st world because the 20% creating them are not economically suicidal, are aimed at utilizing other 20%ers for their brains, not their manual dexterity. If manual production is needed, it's outsourced to China, India, Asia, South America or Mexico. Who in the west can afford to purchase their own goods if they are produced in the west without some government subsidy at some point in the process?
Technology really makes us redundant and less efficient to the bottom line of any company trying to compete globally and fulfill it's obligation to shareholders. The welfare state and how it is exacerbated or gotten past will define how the 1st world nations of this planet move forward. China and India are both happy to let 1b of their population rot in the country side scratching out a living from the soil. The west doesn't have that option due to how we have divorced our cultures from the land post WW2 for technology and modernism.
I don't see lines of recent college graduates begging to work the fields here in the U.S. so they can get back on the farm. While in Seattle all the kids with masters and doctorate degrees are being fired from their burger flipping and barista jobs over the new $15hr minimum wage. And in Japan, fishing and farming industries are disappearing because everyone wants to be one of the 20% and live in Tokyo or other Japanese big cities.
So global warming nor oil availability is our real looming problem. The next big problem will be ourselves and how we are divorced from the outcomes technology has made available over night to those who don't want to think about us as the 7billion pound and getting fatter gorilla in the room. The industrial revolution was fast but, still at a manageable speed for the human condition.
I Guess we should all start scratching dirt.