Pkruse said:
... The only direction that will change is that we will produce even more with less. Manufacturing used to be a place where someone with a low level of education could learn to do something fairly simple, get paid very well, and keep doing the same thing for 40 years until they retired with a nice pension. Those days are gone, and they are never returning. We currently have nothing to replace it with in our economic system to pay people with little education very well for productive work. If they are working at all, they are mostly in low paid service jobs.
But as our economy changes in this direction, we have plenty of opportunities to provide productive work with good pay. That will require a structural change in our system. If anyone would like to discuss what those changes might be and how we might bring them about, then we can continue this thread.
Unfortunately, I cannot find an excellent yet rather alarming article over on
Project Syndicate in which different economist's takes on the issue you identify are discussed (saw it several months ago). IIRC, the consensus (of a small sample) was that indeed, if anything the hollowing out of the middle ground will accelerate.
In the West this is owed to both the effect of technologically-driven changes in capital goods, as well as to the massive coming on line of semi-skilled labor elsewhere. Now it is Asia's turn at some of these jobs, but increasingly these will shift to Africa and other areas. In fact, emerging middle classes in places like China may find that their time in the sun is far more short-lived than ours has been.
The fundamental divide among low-paying service jobs and highly skilled labor or professional positions, coupled with rapid increases in the cost of education, is and will create high barriers to social mobility, so among the "things to do about it" I think we will need to finally get serious about education reform, not only in quality and availability but also in reinforcing life-long learning and encouraging career change late in life.
A dark twist on this is that in those places where we observe a large pool of highly educated people who vastly outnumber available jobs, such as Egypt, we find the sort of frustration that comes from glimpsing paradise from the outside and being denied entry. It is no surprise, then, that many terrorists are frustrated engineers with degrees and no jobs. So, whatever is done to improve the skills of workers in the West will still need to be done in a way such as not to massly overproduce graduates nor create false expectations.
Though it may sound odd, I think we may need to encourage somewhat of a return to agriculture, in the form of smaller, self-sustaining, energy-efficient, family-run operations. Nothing massive, but say a move toward 10-15% of total employment. This implies advances in both renewable energy and agronomics I am not qualified to judge, so this may be nothing of a solution at all. Were it possible, urban design of smaller city centers surrounded by energy- and food-productive land is intuitively appealing.
On the positive side, advances in 3d printing for design to finished product might allow for a turn away from mass production and global distribution, for reasons of cost, energy, and time. This could give rise to a sort of mass customization trend that may actually employ more labor for local assembly of ad-hoc goods.
In terms of social policy, at some point we will need to solve the basic issue of how a large mass of minimum wage workers can receive both adequate health care and retire with a very modest yet sufficient income, financed necessarily by a smaller minority of high earners. Regardless of one's political philosophy, failure to address this adequately is asking for a dystopian nightmare.
