The future; but not the one we wanted

I studied Economics in the late 1970's. The challenge bothering the minds of those pseudo-scientists then was "What are we going to do with all our free time?".

You see back then the presumption was that advances in technology were going to increase productivity and reduce the need for human labour to a point where we would all be fully paid but under-employed.

How wrong we got that!

Oh, they got it right that productivity would increase and the need for human labour would decrease; what they forgot was capitalism. Which, in retrospect, is weird. It's not like the West wasn't a Capitalist economy then. I think we were just much nicer and more naive. Productivity increased, as did profits, and the reduced need for human labour was seen as an excuse to get rid of the workers, not to give them the same reward for less labour, and the profits increased exponentially for the investors. So progress made some a lot poorer and the lucky few had to work harder and the even luckier fewer got enormously rich. The emphasis on investment got emphasised and the contribution of the worker got diminished. To further increase the return on investment the risks associated with business were pushed on to the employees or, where that wasn't practical, the government. Maintaining competitive advantage during lean times meant laying people off and getting the government, by which I mean taxpayers, to pay for such inconveniences. Yet in the good times all the might of commerce was brought to bear to restrict the power of workers and discourage governments from increasing revenue. Do we see a pattern? It is an historical fact that all the great empires, sorry, economies have been founded on slavery. The Roman empire, the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire, The United States of America - none could have flourished without slavery.