What If There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

The TL;DR: "A new paper says the problem is not supply. It’s that firms just don’t have enough demand for labor."

Here is a press release from the folks who authored the study: http://rooseveltinstitute.org/demand_side_dynamism/

And here is the paper (warning: pdf): http://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Dec...

Is the "infinite work hypothesis" finally ending??

The answer to "what happens to workers being replaced" has always been "they'll find jobs elsewhere, every time you make a job redundant you create other new jobs", what I've seen called the "infinite work hypothesis" where there will always be new work and the problem is agility, job training, not demand.

No, the problem is misallocation of labor.

There's a huge to-do list of jobs that need to be done at almost every level, from design and build of significant infrastructure in most countries around the world, to community-level support work.

It would be perfectly possible to retrain the long term unemployed for all but the most difficult design and management elements.

They're not done because the metrics of Wall St deem them "not profitable" - which means traders can't make quick gains out of them.

Allocating labor on the basis of whether or not traders and stock owners can profit in the short to medium term turns out to be an unintelligent way to strategise an economy.

I feel like ancient civilizations a lot of times turned to art once their societies leveled off. Large structures, pots, roads, figures, clothing, etc.. I believe art is unlimited resource and we could have an economy running purely on art. Isn't a large portion of the economy already running off of art? Movies, games, tv, media, events. I actually feel there even a lack of art right now in terms of food, furniture, products in general. I'd pay for objects with more thought put into them, but there isn't enough people today to dedicate their time to art. With all these menial jobs taken up, maybe even more people will turn to custom crafts and trades. Where what I'm paying for is the creativity and uniqueness of the objects I'm buying.