[pro8ndi]

The extreme is an entire country unprepared to deal with the end of the emotional meme they’ve spent their lives soaking up.

It’s pretty simple:

Ownership is unwilling to spend on the mess their wealth relies on.

The masses are too incapable of adaptation on their own, having been trained to fit radiators and hub caps, not participate in the political process.

Adam Smith’s concern over extreme division of labor making the masses emotionally ignorant & complacent animals came true.

There are few options. The country isn’t going to handle tens of thousands of laborers with 40+ years of life left in them mulling about.

A new New Deal is in order. Social welfare work is about the only job left for the masses once automation is doing enough.

[ctdonath]

Industries shift, new jobs appear. It happens. It's normal. Socially engineering on the assumption "the end of work is near" has proven disastrous.

[steelframe]

> A new New Deal is in order.

Maaayyyyybe, but if it is, it won't become obvious until we've gone through a period of economic devastation similar to that of the Great Depression.

[crooked-v]

> social welfare work

Why require it to be work? Giving out a UBI would be more productive than inventing filler work.

[ctdonath]

Training people to expect sustenance for nothing is a disaster in the making.

[corey_moncure]

>Social welfare work is about the only job left for the masses once automation is doing enough.

I was thinking residential-scale agriculture but for the most part I agree with your conclusions. This doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. If all that's left to do is pick our own veggies from the fields, then we've won the game. Probably we can offset the use of environmentally toxic substances with all the extra labor we'll have.

End stage capitalism may start to look a lot like communism in certain aspects.