The End of the American Middle Class? [View all]

[marmar]

from HuffPost:


Steven Strauss

The End of the American Middle Class?
Posted: 01/04/2015 11:56 pm EST Updated: 01/04/2015 11:59 pm EST

Are we destined to be techno-serfs serving a ruling elite of information oligopolies?

In the brave new world envisioned by pundits, we will all be micro-entrepreneurs with personal brands -- each of us controlling our own destiny, selling our services into digitally enabled markets. Traditional employers and wage slavery will be extinct.

Unfortunately, the companies of this new economy aren't philanthropic do-gooders. They are profit-maximizing corporations, with incentives (and increasingly, the market power) to pay their personnel (AKA independent contractors, euphemistically called micro-entrepreneurs) as little as possible. This could lead to a future with a small affluent elite, and the rest of us reduced to techno-serfism.

Economists (see, David Autor and David Dorn (2013); Maarten Goos, Alan Manning, and Anna Salomons (2014)) have noted a long-term hollowing out and polarization of our labor markets due to offshoring and automation. The result is: rapidly increasing demand and productivity for high-skilled "knowledge" workers (e.g., software developers); some increased demand for certain types of low-skilled service workers with jobs difficult to automate or offshore (e.g., home health care workers, waitressing); and collapsing demand for middle-skilled workers with jobs easily automated or offshored (e.g., assembly line workers in manufacturing). All of which helps explain the increasing levels of income inequality we have been experiencing in the U.S. (see, Wojciech Kopczuk, Emmanuel Saez and Jae Song (2010)).

.....(snip).....

So, we have a plausible future where profits, information and political power (the leading companies of the Digital Economy already invest heavily in politics) increasingly accrue to a small group of technology-driven oligopolies. And the rest of us are reduced to commoditized micro-entrepreneurship (i.e., techno-serf) roles, paid the minimum the Amazons of the world calculate as necessary (given our lack of alternative employers) -- but paying the maximum these oligopolistic powerhouses can charge.

Welcome to our potential future -- is wage slavery starting to look good? .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-strauss/the-end-of-the-american-m_b_6413660.html