The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

The Corporate System is actually collapsing.

Nor mine, not in the short term.

Corporations != Corporate System. A corporation is a private-sector enterprise that performs some set of business processes to make a return on capital. Not all of those are bad. Anyway, those will be around for a long time. The Corporate System is the current economic totalitarianism in which it's pretty much impossible to stay afloat without corporate blessing. That's dying off, but not immediately and not without a fight.

Large corporations have the majority of the wealth and capital, and are frighteningly efficient at weilding that to lobby government for corporate-friendly business environment, and continue to be rent-seeking cartels in any industry where a barrier to entry can be constructed.

The shift is gradual but real. From 1945 to 2008, people believed in corporations. Even the more liberal people of the time, like Bill Clinton, were pro-corporate, insofar as "pro-business" meant pro-corporate and the idea that one can support capitalism but despise corporations (mainstream high-IQ libertarianism, now) was at the extreme fringe.

Now, even our right-wing (Tea Party) is anti-corporate. (They hate government more, and they're deeply wrongheaded, but many of them are anti-corporate; I'll give them that.) It took a while, but people have started to lose faith in their corporate masters. That is the first step (the first of many).

Sure, there's still a lot of regulatory corruption and rent-seeking and extreme inefficiency, and it won't die off tomorrow, but I have no doubt that it's on its way down, and probably in the next couple of decades.

In 1999, if you said that the world was run by evil people or idiots and that Corporate America was a travesty, you'd be seen as a bitter loser and laughed off the table-- even in liberal circles. Post-2008, no one argues against that viewpoint.

So the Corporate System has lost the people's faith, and it has also lost its ability to provide full employment. Those are two major changes. It won't be overthrown next month, and its demise will be painful (because its owners will externalize much of the pain to the middle and lower classes) but it will happen.

Along the same lines I had an office a few years ago in an office park about 1 mile from a Walmart.

In all the years I was there nobody ever knocked on our door looking for work or dropping off a resume. At the Walmart though I'm almost certain that they had a steady stream of job seekers showing up and filling out employment forms.

I've helped two doctors get better jobs just with the simple suggestion that they proactively contact all the relevant departments within a radius of where they could work and not wait until called by a recruiter or by responding to an ad. They got multiple offers and essentially had no competition (jobs hadn't been posted yet).

One time I got a job that I was unqualified for by simply flying out to a tradeshow after doing some research and cold calling various sales managers in person (had setup some interviews in advance as well). Got hired two times (short 3 year period when I didn't work at my own thing). Worked great. No doubt in my mind that if I had responded to an ad with a resume, that since I wasn't really qualified, I wouldn't have been picked or even come close to getting an interview.

No, corporations are actually getting more powerful.

they're no longer an efficient way of turning human efforts into salable work.

They're as efficient as they've ever been.

The value of managed human work is going to zero (anything that a manager can tell a person to do, a person can program a machine to do)

No, we don't have human-level AI yet.

Convexity will end the Corporate System for good.

There are always diminishing returns, if you go far enough. Sufficiently rapid innovation may push everyone leftwards on the logistic skill-level curve for a while, but it's only ever temporary.