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What the Davos Crowd Needs to Understand
Me, at MoneyWatch with what turns into a mini-rant towards the end:
What the Davos crowd needs to understand: One of the themes of this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos this year is “Preparing for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.” How will digital technology and the rise of robots affect job opportunities in the future? Also on the agenda are discussions about globalization – how it has altered the political and economic landscape, and fueled resentment among workers who feel overlooked and cast aside while those at the top get immensely rich.
This is reminiscent of a debate within economics: Are wage stagnation, high levels of displacement and unemployment in areas like the industrial Midwest and the bleak outlook for the future many people have due to globalization or technological change? …
What’s important is not what caused so many people to lose their jobs or to find a job (if they could at all) that’s not as good as the one they lost. It’s that the “global elite” begin to fully comprehend how much resentment people feel over what has happened to their lives, to their communities and to their children’s futures. …
So far, those who have benefited so much from globalization and technological change — the type of people who attend Davos — have managed to find scapegoats that deflect blame from themselves. …
The working class is told, for example, that immigration is to blame and a wall is the answer, or that their troubles arise from a government that devotes all of its attention to the “undeserving” poor while ignoring them — and with Donald Trump in power all that will change. Workers are told it’s because of taxes or regulation: Take care of those and the economy will boom — America will be great again!
But take a look at what has happened to the share of income since the 1970s. …
Source: http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2017/01/what-the-davos-crowd-needs-to-understand.html
