Worker-Free Products: A Year Later, The Daily Mail Catches Up With Whys

I never thought I'd say this, but here it comes: I was very pleased to see a headline on the front of the Daily Mail (6th December 2016). I hope it's at least the start of a bit of realism out there. 

In an earlier post (December 2015, hence the title) I warned that we are entering a huge technology-led industrial revolution, just as drastic as the one which began two and a half centuries ago. In fact I added an update referencing Mr Carney's own industry, banking.

The issue is serious and fundamental. It requires changing the way resources flow through our society, which will no longer be built round the kind of mass workforce so essential to the entrepreneurs of the past. Now an entrepreneur can make money without having to recruit a large workforce, by using technology and digital media -and maybe a small team of experts to run it. So they get to hang on to any money they make, not having to share it with a host of workers. If there is no workforce there are no wages out of which taxes and National Health contributions can be taken. How then will the essential services that look after us be paid for? And - if there are no workers earning wages, who will buy the products?

Not having large workforces, not needing factories, the new businesses have no need to be localised. They exist as supra-national networks, no longer belonging to this or that nation. Much as we'd like to catch them for a swingeing tax take, how do we do it? And who – as in which country - is going to do it?

If the restructuring of the way resources flow through our society is not taken on by well-intentioned politicians and activists backed up by a well-informed and critical electorate, it will be done by assholes (Click on the link for my explanation of that particular terminology). The future world will still need resources, whether physical as in ores, energy and crops, or infrastructure such as communications. Whoever controls those things controls everything else. You know what? I think the assholes are already on it.

This post is not meant to be an analysis. I already did that. I'm glad the Mail, in its inimitable way, has given me the opportunity to flag it up again. It's important. Go to the links. 

Here they are again:

http://whysgetsserious.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/about-economics.html


http://whysgetsserious.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/about-assholes.html