Where this all ends --- It ends, says economist Jeff Faux, in "the servant economy." [View all]

[kpete]

Where this all ends

It ends, says economist Jeff Faux, in "the servant economy."

I'm talking about a future for the working American and the working American family. It seems to me that much of the debate about what's going to happen to America is about America's place in the world. Washington is full of discussions about, is the U.S. down? Is China up? And then we look at the economy from a perspective of somewhat abstraction but the question that I ask in the book is not what's going to happen to America in the world, but what's going to happen to Americans, given the evidence that's all around us.

And by The Servant Economy, I'm talking about a future, another 10 or 15 years towards which we are headed, in which we will see class divisions much deeper than we have today. We will see disappointed young people who are over-educated for the jobs that they're being offered.

We're going to see a low-wage, increasingly low-wage economy, pensions gone, people having to work until they drop and I think that's where we're headed. It sounds like a dystopian nightmare, but if you look at the economic evidence, it's seems to be that's clear.

For example, we know that even before the great crash of 2008, American wages, hourly wages had been flat for 30 years, real wages, that is if you adjust for inflation, flat for 30 years. Now that doesn't mean no one ever got a raise, but it means that someone in 2007, just before the crash, who had two years of college education and a certain amount of experience was getting no more than that person in 1979.

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http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2012-07-17/jeff-faux-servant-economy/transcript
http://prairieweather.typepad.com/big_blue_stem/2012/07/where-this-all-ends.html