I think he's underestimating automation and his argument about productivity growth is easily countered.  Productivity is low because there are less good jobs so people are forced to work in unproductive roles like gig workers, Uber drivers, etc.,(reply>), @Ali gave such an impression he paid attention to rhetoric and spew. When Ali has something to say, he'll say it. When others have something to say, Ali says, that's not anything to think about, even though Ali is here wondering who just might have something to say.,(reply>), Henry Choy dude I am not going to read your comment.,(reply>), @Ali please wait a cotton picking minute. Ok I come back from picking cotton. CoTtOn. It was fun. No it wasn't. I went to measure the productivity in manufacturing. Here's are the informations. You may become interested. Developed countries workforce percentage in manufacturing decreased steadily from 1970 (was it really 50 years? holy cats). Next, manufacturing is measured in dollars. Who would have guessed right? The rate of change in the productivity has been positive in many, many countries. That means productivity has increased and increased. Monotonically. Yay.<br><br><br>Here's another statistic. In many countries food waste per capita is greater than your own weight unless you're a fatass who actually tries to prevent food waste within reach. Is this kind of statistic fear mongering? Why is food wasted even if some people are starving? It isn't because of cruelty. It's because machines produce too much. You say "productivity is relativity low". Well, that may be, actually. It really feels that way, when you consider the SPEED of machines. How faster are they? They're fast enough to produce more than can be easily consumed, that's for sure. Twenty years ago I was in a factory that manufactured some car parts. These parts were quite complex. If you were to make one by hand it could take you hours being paid 5 times the minimum wage (which was kind of low back then). We're talking quality parts and skilled precision detailed work. But of course who would make these things by hand? There were machines that could make these parts while requiring zero people during the production run. Once the inputs were set up, you just hit the go button and grab the outputs. How fast were the machines? They were the size of two refrigerators and could make one part per second. Not quite as fast as a machine gun, but way way way louder, and the machines ran for hours. A machine gun runs out of ammo in seconds. I suppose if a person was to go that fast, that person would make even more noise. Machines are powerful, fast, and capable, better than people. That was twenty years ago. That was before the application of AI to putting people out of work. If there is a will to automate a task, it could well be automated. Now, productivity has increased monotonically over the last twenty years. Who isn't going to look over their shoulder to see if a robot is coming to replace them?,(reply>), This is the same rhetoric that Yang spewed. You can measure productivity in specific industries like manufacturing and you clearly see that productivity is relativity low. Stop with the fear mongering of automation! Automation is needed in any advanced society. Also, no one knows anything about what the future of AI is going to be.,(reply>), @LordF so says "competition does not lead to wage stagnation." The evidence is clear, I guess. That vehicle happens to be evidence, valuable evidence. People actually elected Trump, when good sense would have predicted that he wouldn't have made it onto the ballot. In a world without wage stagnation, there wouldn't be any call to make America great AGAIN. Because it wouldn't have stopped being great. You can't start until you already stopped. Like you can't start eating until you stopped eating. Moreover, even as those people in the third world offered themselves up for exploitation (and make no mistake, in that part of the globe a dog eats a dog), and pat themselves on the back for their daring do, for their justly earned riches, wages in the first world are hitting a ceiling. This is a warning signal, a canary's death, that ought to make people wake up. It's not a matter of a rising tide lifting boats. It's more a matter of a rising tide where HOPE is a trapped school child in Thai caves. Hope can only run so far.<br><br><br>Who says the financial system should not exist? Free market capitalism - bring it on. But corruption in the financial system is a red herring in the discussion. Add more corruption or wipe it out, that won't make much difference. Corruption in the financial system is to be expected, like weeds in Mary's garden. Mary's garden will still have the silver bells and cockle shells because by and large people need to live, so they will develop workarounds for the weeds.<br><br><br>As far as central banks and wage stagnation, yes," expansionism may well have caused stagnation. Without the expansion (<a href=""https://www.usdebtclock.org/world-debt-clock.html)"">https://www.usdebtclock.org/world-debt-clock.html)</a>", the world would have been quite different I think. Wages would have imploded or wars would have raged, well, to a much fiercer extent. Corruption in the financial system prevented the barely checked corruption in the masses from seeking retribution. Instead corruption in the financial system fed the corruption in the masses by leading them to believe that property would be a source of wealth for everyone. There was complicity all over the place. The silver lining is that people came to see fragility in their own thinking. As I said, when people are not rising, they're falling. They try any game that offers a chance of winning because not playing is a chance to lose, and who wants to lose by default? But when people play a game, in comparison to the best players, most players are quite bad. This means people will always dig themselves holes.<br><br><br>No one believes that their future is guaranteed. However, it is not so simple to jump from one type of work to another. It takes some study in order to be a butcher, a baker, or a candlestick maker. That is, a healthcare professional, a trades worker, or an STEM person. And the thing is, more and more of these high level tasks are being done by machines, so much that it is more difficult to find work, especially whenever a new device or technology takes over what a person needed days and weeks to do. By the way, the guy who was replaced with the door, he wasn't a door opener, he was like a Walmart greeter who wasn't supposed to greet anyone. He got replaced by a door-like device, more like a little gate. But people should look at their own work and realize that a lot of it could well be simplistic. If a machine or a stupider person can be used, an economic pinch might bring that about.