General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: My Wife Believes American Workers Being Positioned To Accept Lower Living Standard. [View all]The2ndWheel
(7,947 posts)The rest of the world has been opening up for decades. The more people there are available for work, the less you're going to need to pay for work to be done. Throw in advances in automation, and people are not only competing against other people, but machines that don't need to eat, sleep, or have children to take care of.
That's where, eventually, governments will just have to give money to people as a basic income, or else there will be a lot of unrest in various forms. But then we come back to the finite planet thing.
If all the work is getting done, but people who don't have to do that work still have money and so still consume all that is produced(which sounds an awful lot like all those rich people we hate), is there enough planet for everyone? Not only in terms of people. There's a whole web of life out there that shares the planet with us. How much of the planet have we already privatized for the human species? How much more will we take?