The article isn't lamenting capitalism, it's lamenting that we're leaving it behind and have no idea what to do next.
> Nearly 1 billion people have been taken out of extreme poverty in 20 years
But it has been done without generating the sort of full-time blue collar employment that is implied behind all sorts of economic policies around the globe. China has gone from feudalism to post-industrial robotization in one generation, skipping most the wealth-building industrialization phase Western Europe and North America went through in the last century.
The global creed is "you're not worth something without work", yet we are, for all purposes, running out of work. The computer revolution is optimizing away all its menial jobs already – just how much have trends like virtualization, clouds, infrastructure orchestration and so on reduced the demand for warm bodies to throw at hardware issues in the last few years? – while education systems still haven't finished ramping up the creation of more and more menial labourers. The earlier industrial revolutions have, quite soon, created more jobs than they destroyed, but this does not seem to happen any more.
We've reached the point where we have, globally, more people of working age than we can possibly need to satisfy all global needs, and this trend is not going to reverse.
And the problem is: We have no idea what to do about it. The left is blabbing "muh robots" and "muh basic income", but nobody has a consistent, practicable theory of what a post-full-employment society (which is something entirely different from a post-employment-at-all society) could look like. We're still going to need menial labour, blue collar work, white collar… but not enough. What do we do with all the excess population?
> Nearly 1 billion people have been taken out of extreme poverty in 20 years
But it has been done without generating the sort of full-time blue collar employment that is implied behind all sorts of economic policies around the globe. China has gone from feudalism to post-industrial robotization in one generation, skipping most the wealth-building industrialization phase Western Europe and North America went through in the last century.
The global creed is "you're not worth something without work", yet we are, for all purposes, running out of work. The computer revolution is optimizing away all its menial jobs already – just how much have trends like virtualization, clouds, infrastructure orchestration and so on reduced the demand for warm bodies to throw at hardware issues in the last few years? – while education systems still haven't finished ramping up the creation of more and more menial labourers. The earlier industrial revolutions have, quite soon, created more jobs than they destroyed, but this does not seem to happen any more.
We've reached the point where we have, globally, more people of working age than we can possibly need to satisfy all global needs, and this trend is not going to reverse.
And the problem is: We have no idea what to do about it. The left is blabbing "muh robots" and "muh basic income", but nobody has a consistent, practicable theory of what a post-full-employment society (which is something entirely different from a post-employment-at-all society) could look like. We're still going to need menial labour, blue collar work, white collar… but not enough. What do we do with all the excess population?