Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails
This is an important article, but I doubt there will be a useful discussion of it here.<p>The developed world has incredible productive capacity. With 1% of the workforce in agriculture and 8% in manufacturing, the US produces as much stuff as China.  There are no significant shortages of any manufactured good anywhere in the developed world. Quality is pretty good across the board, too. This is unique in history.<p>That's great. But there's less productive work to go around. We're out of buying power. Labor is worth less because there's a labor glut. Our economic system can't cope with that.  On top of this, more of what most people can do is being automated, and for less money. Automation used to be expensive. Now, if a computer can do it, it will be far cheaper than a human.<p>The financial system has become primarily self-serving, running on self-generated zero-sum tasks.  It's part of the problem, not part of the solution.  If we had a capital shortage, that might be a problem. Instead, we have a capital glut, and no place to put it that produces good returns on investment.  This is "secular stagnation", as the article puts it.<p>Japan hit this around 1989, when their real estate bubble collapsed.  Japan never came back from that.  There was hope that the Japanese would figure out something.  25 years later, they haven't. They've built up their safety net and put money into infrastructure projects, so that fewer people are suffering.  That's the best they could come up with.<p>We have no successful model for dealing with this.  What capitalism gives us by default is a small number of rich people and a large number of poor people competing for a shrinking pool of low-paying jobs.  Nobody really knows what to do about this, including the people who say they do.