On craftsmanship and effective value, and, eventually, the death of the rural economy

[quiescere]

(Warning: this entry actually came out a lot darker and more depressing than I expected. You might want to skip or delay reading if you can't face that sort of thing at the moment.)

A couple of days ago I mentioned the decreasing relative value of craftsmanship. I'll use woodwork as my primary example, but other fields face the same problem.

Comments

[angry_user]

It's past time that we started having conversations in this country about how to transition the social safety net to something based around a guaranteed/universal wage. Automation ain't gonna stop. We're going to reach a point where there just literally are not enough things to do for the size of our population to earn their way.

There are some interesting nuggets in a discussion here:
http://www.roadraceautox.com/showthread.php?57839-Work-vs-Welfare-Tradeoff-A-study
(warning: that's a forum full of type a guys that can afford a racing habit. Many are smart, several are open-minded and I learn from, but more than a few are "southern white conservative male".)

It would be nice if we could get out in front of this, b/c stories like this are depressing:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/08/opinion/the-american-dream-quantified-at-last.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/08/opinion/the-american-dream-quantified-at-last.html