#5 A radical plan to deal with chronic (50%) technological unemployment

AMERICAN CITIZENS TRUST

A Disaster Prevention And Recovery Plan

In The Face Of Increasing Technological Unemployment

By Dr. Rafael Haddock, Ph.D.

Background

This document presents a disaster recovery plan which may never have to be implemented. The plan is designed to prevent a disaster if a certain scenario becomes reality as we move into the 21st century. Arguments can be had as to how likely this scenario is. However, even unlikely scenarios benefit from development of contingency plans in case the scenario comes about with disastrous results. The sinking of the Titanic was considered very unlikely scenario. So was the bringing down of the World Trade Center in New York City. And yet…

The Scenario

There is a growing consensus among experts that technological unemployment is a phenomenon that is here to stay. Automation of jobs from the simplest manual labor to many complex analytical tasks are likely to be done by increasingly intelligent machines in the future. Estimates range anywhere from 25% to 50% of all jobs permanently disappearing by 2050. Those who dare think beyond that see a future in which 90% of current jobs disappear. It may be that the Titanic will not sink but we ought to at least have a contingency plan to recover if it does.

The question becomes: can our free enterprise capitalist financial system survive if a significant part of the population has little or no disposable income with which to purchase the goods and services that make the economic machinery work? What happens to consumer demand when 50% plus of the people have no money to spend beyond the simplest and most basic necessities of life?

A Solution

Painful as it may seem at first blush, the solution is to find ways to put disposable income into the hands of a large portion of the population and do so while they remain unemployed in the traditional sense. This then leads to some fundamental questions:

•    Where will the money come from?

•    On what basis is this money distributed to people?

•    Who decides how much and for what?

Future posts will address these questions.