50 years ago, society operated just fine with (to a first approximation) 50% of society not working.  What happened was we had created an political structure and economy where the metric of &quot;employment&quot; became something to be optimized and effectively achieved an economic system driven to optimize that one number (mostly by screwing the poor) [0].<p>1) obsessing about employment numbers is exactly the problem.<p>2) it will be catastrophic unless we change our economic system.<p>[0] I&#x27;m talking about the weird &quot;dual mandate&quot; of the central banks - &quot;maintain employment numbers&quot; and &quot;keep inflation in check&quot;:  Mostly they have chosen to attack the first with policies encouraging positive inflation, occasionally ignoring the second altogether.  A great way to keep employment up is to require people to get jobs in order to stay on a compounding treadmill of currency devaluation.  So we see a lot more people entering the workforce too, with collateral damage that families now have to have two working parents, single parents can barely support their children, people go into massive debt to get past the first jobs gatekeeper (college) etc.