Will technological progress lead to mass unemployment? People have been asking that question for two centuries, and the actual answer has always ended up being no. Technology eliminates some jobs, but it has always generated enough new jobs to offset these losses, and there’s every reason to believe that it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
But progress isn’t painless. Business types and some economists may talk glowingly about the virtues of creative destruction, but the process can be devastating economically and socially for those who find themselves on the destruction side of the equation. This is especially true when technological change undermines not just individual workers but whole communities.
This isn’t a hypothetical proposition. It’s a big part of what has happened to rural America.
This process and its effects are laid out in devastating, terrifying and baffling detail in “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy,” a new book by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman. I say […]
Every single article today is a dismal view of what has happened to this country. How much worse can it get? Our educational system is ranked quite low in the world. Our literacy rate is scandalous, our income disparity is horrifying, the number of people who are poor continues to rise, our health care is one of the worst in the world for individual people. And yet the lies keep being broadcast on conservative stations that a huge number of Americans watch and get their information. and fooling people into believing things that make them angrier than they are already. Where will this end?
Terri Quint
As agriculture in America has become more factory style, not only has it yielded a crop of discontent but it has also accelerated the destruction of the environment that will leave us with another and worse dustbowl.