All we have been hearing in the news, is how the economy depends on creating jobs. Our politics of late is fixated on it. But the reality is that technological innovation has transformed the employment landscape so permanently that the very idea of work and employment for the majority are becoming an obsolete notion.
As consumers, we have been trained into realizing the convenience of using technology in our daily lives. The ATM appeared in the early eighties, and accounts for the lion's share of cash transactions now. How about those new self-serve checkouts in supermarkets? Or the web-based shopping cart. These examples represent a structural change in the way that we are all prepared to accept technology, under the notion of saving us time and money. This has the effect of displacing the most expensive business expense; the wage earning employee. And these technological innovations have only just started to make inroads into our consumer and professional lives.
Many have talked about jobless economic growth for a decade now, citing stagnant wage growth coupled with the exporting of manufacturing and services to low wage economies. Even corporate profits are sent off shore to low tax countries like Ireland. Complicating government's ability to respond its spending strategies with dwindling sources of taxation.
Science Fiction has been telling us of this glorious future, one where we are free to chase a our dreams, instead of exchanging toil for wealth. But the transitions in our social values and economic systems have yet to catch up. The term of welfare state is used to describe those high taxing nations who endeavor to provide social infrastructure to all regardless of income. Its widely perceived among monetarist economists, that this is of detriment to an economy, stifling innovation and a peoples' will to work.
In fact the social stigma of unemployment perpetuates inefficient practices. I was talking to a plumber replacing my water meter the other week. He said that the union forbids electronic metering equipment, because it will cause layoffs in the water utility. Economic prosperity of an entrepreneur, company or country relies on innovation. Innovation in commercial terms, is code for efficiency including labor productivity, and/or efficient use of materials/processes.
Productivity has aided our standards of living allowing us a better lifestyle than our forebears, precisely because technology has made life's essentials so much cheaper to produce. We have to move beyond those notions of personal success in terms of employment and income. Because the next decade it will become harder for all of us to remain "employed" in the traditional sense of the term.
