It's not the first time, and it will take a while to see if it remains low. It could also be that people are moving outside of the labor market; there are a rising number of one-income families with female heads of households, for example (which will take social adjustment of a different type).
Perhaps, automation has increased leisure time, and how we distribute that leisure time is as much an economic problem as the distribution of any other good. For the moment our strategy has been "ignore it and hope it works itself out", which I don't believe is necessarily the best possible mechanism.
Yeah, new social norms are somewhat going to have to emerge from the cultural soup. I think the biggest one I'd advocate would be divorcing "not having a job" from "undeserving", which it is clearly connected to right now (unless it's connected to "child-like"). I can't help but think it's because the people making the policy have never been in the situation where it is difficult to get a job, much less impossible. If we were able to do that, I suspect a bunch of other things would follow.
If I'm understanding the idea, it will clearly require a large, relatively sudden shift in cultural practices and perceptions. To my relatively uneducated thinking, there aren't many things that can accomplish such a shift, with `war' being the most likely, followed perhaps by national collapse and contact with extraterrestrial intelligence (a steep slope, to be sure; probably there are other points on the graph that I'm just not anticipating).
If we assume that war is not worth causing just to provoke this shift, and that ET contact is really unlikely, then I wonder if there is anything in the current culture/economy of some place like Franc, Switzerland, or Canada that would be illustrative?
Perhaps, automation has increased leisure time, and how we distribute that leisure time is as much an economic problem as the distribution of any other good. For the moment our strategy has been "ignore it and hope it works itself out", which I don't believe is necessarily the best possible mechanism.
Yeah, new social norms are somewhat going to have to emerge from the cultural soup. I think the biggest one I'd advocate would be divorcing "not having a job" from "undeserving", which it is clearly connected to right now (unless it's connected to "child-like"). I can't help but think it's because the people making the policy have never been in the situation where it is difficult to get a job, much less impossible.
If we were able to do that, I suspect a bunch of other things would follow.
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If we assume that war is not worth causing just to provoke this shift, and that ET contact is really unlikely, then I wonder if there is anything in the current culture/economy of some place like Franc, Switzerland, or Canada that would be illustrative?
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