
How Efficiency Is Wiping Out the Middle Class - JumpCrisscross
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/business/dealbook/how-efficiency-is-wiping-out-the-middle-class.html?em_pos=small&emc=edit_dk_20170125&nl=dealbook&nl_art=5&nlid=65508833&ref=headline&te=1
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philipkglass
_One of capitalism’s bedrock promises — one that dates back to Adam Smith — is
that competition in the free market benefits society at large. Somewhere along
the line, intoxication with efficiency caused us to lose sight of that
principle at the expense of workers. Getting back to that promise will require
policy changes and a renewal of forgotten values._

Ugh. It was Smith's _observation_ about capitalism, and a _historically
contingent_ one at that, not a _promise_. I don't know if the author fails to
understand the difference or is just pandering to an audience that fails to
understand the difference.

There's a myopic nostalgia for never-when in so many of these half-baked
proposals for social adaptation to automation. Provide everyone with rewarding
lifetime careers again! Make capitalism great again, no matter that you have
to tack on so many modifications that Adam Smith could no longer identify it
from a police lineup! It's like inept geometers proclaiming that regular
polyhedra are really just the best and newest kinds of spheres, because their
culture is saturated in the mythology of Glorious Supremacy of Sphere.

