First, there are plenty of jobs, but not enough people that have decided to develop themselves enough to have the skills to do them. For example (a real life one, unfortunately for me): I need a biopsy of a mass near my heart, but the current waiting time for this procedure here in Seattle (at both major hospitals) is two months. What we do have is plenty of regulations that constrain the supply of physicians, servic…
That's like saying there's plenty of room for musicians if you're Mozart. The amount of investment required to develop yourself for a target field has grown astronomically, but that's been coupled with a push down in wages. I know lawyers who spent a fortune for their degree, passed the Bar, and make barely more than minimum wage. Regulation isn't causing this; automation is causing this.
Neither regulation nor automation is causing this. Political-economic suppression of labor and productive enterprise in favor of rent-seeking is causing this.
Let's imagine an alternate universe in which different political choices were made. For instance, in the alternate universe, Elon Musk started a techno-progressive political party and swept into power in 2008, with a program calling for:
* Massive housing construction in urban areas
* Full repair of our famously-crumbling infrastructure
* Intercity Hyperloops for America's coastal corridors
* Light-rail and subway construction in the major cities
* Rural broadband everywhere
* Single-payer healthcare
* Reducing the underlying costs of health-care through better disease prevention
* Reducing the underlying costs of health-care through regenerative medicine designed to fight (and someday stop) aging-driven disease and death
Now, the major economic impact here is going to be massive, truly humongous amounts of growth in the state sector, most of it spent directly on employing people to reduce the carrying costs of the economy, increase productivity, and serve immediate human needs. Most of the specific projects to do so are things that we, in this universe, recognize and understand; the more radical projects that we don't already understand how to accomplish promise radical returns.
Putting aside how Elon Musk pays for it all, it would absorb a lot of what is, in our universe, excess labor in the construction and STEM R&D sectors. It would raise wages in the most direct way possible: by buying up labor and paying it to do stuff. It would also increase demand for manufactured goods, leading to either more manufacturing employment or more automation R&D.
That alternate universe is the economically normal universe -- this is what we've been fooled into forgetting. In that universe, unemployment, low growth rates, and low returns on investments in physical production indicate that useful inputs to production are lying fallow, useful stuff that could get done is not getting done.
Our universe is the weird one, in which relatively high unemployment and low growth are considered the normal state of affairs, with corrective intervention to use the idle resources sounding weird or impossible. The simplest reason someone would actually prefer our universe to Elon Musk's high-tech, job-filled, high-wage alternate universe is because they want labor to be cheap because they make their money from rents on monopolies, land, natural resources, and access to capital, and expensive labor is a threat to rents in general.
