
Martin Ford Asks: Will Automation Lead to Economic Collapse? - olalonde
http://singularityhub.com/2009/12/15/martin-ford-asks-will-automation-lead-to-economic-collapse/
======
axiom
The idea that automation creates unemployment is ancient, and has been
debunked over and over. How is it that people don't at least wonder why cars,
manufacturing robots, computers etc. etc, haven't lead to mass systemic
unemployment, but future technologies will?

The reason technology doesn't create systemic unemployment is that people
don't just shrivel up and die when they lose their job. If someone is replaced
with a piece of software they don't just say "oh well, I'm just gonna sit here
and starve." They either find a job in a sector that requires minimal
training, or they re-train. They have no choice!

The basic premise is this: there is no limit on the amount of work that needs
to be done - there is _always_ room for more human labour (either in servicing
other humans or creating goods for them, or whatever.) This is just another
way of stating Say's Law (Wikipedia link: <http://bit.ly/pvD9Hz>) which is
that goods are paid for with other goods. If $x is saved in one area, it just
gets pumped into another part of the economy, creating demand/jobs there. The
net effect of technological progress is: the same number of people producing
more goods and services.

You don't even have to believe me - just look around! this is exactly what's
been happening for thousands of years. Technology has never resulted in
systemic unemployment - only temporary frictional unemployment as people re-
train.

~~~
magicseth
As I look around, I see mass, systemic unemployment taking hold.

This ever increasing march of technology may result in more goods being
created, but due to the nature of our capitalist society, it tends to pool the
capital in those who have capital to begin with.

The huge disparity between the rich and the poor in the US is not due to
"technology" but it is not being helped by it either.

Technology creates efficiencies, but there is no natural way for those
efficiencies to benefit those whom it puts out of work.

~~~
ctdonath
"As I look around, I see mass, systemic unemployment taking hold."

Only because we are paying people to not work, and because fair pay is illegal
under a certain rate. Consequence is that work worth less than minimum wage
cannot, by law, be given to people - and so automation moves in.

Stop paying people to not work and they'll find or make work. (There is a
difference between a safety net and making lack of arbitrary wealth illegal.)

And "the poor", for most practical purposes, does not exist in the US. If you
are living on more - a lot more - than the world median income, if you are
flushing your toilet with drinking water, if you have a TV & car & cell phone
& AC & thermostat heating & >1000 sq ft housing & ..., if you have over
$1/meal/person/day[1], and etc you're not poor.

[1] - <http://abuckaplate.blogspot.com>

~~~
Qz
You're forgetting that many of the people who have those things you describe
can only actually 'afford' them in the US because of cheap credit. If they
were to sell all those things at the price they bought them, they would still
be in debt, and thus _are_ , in fact, poor.

~~~
ctdonath
Cheap credit is a luxury. You're ignoring a host of mitigating factors.

If your choice is 850 days of food vs. a TV, and you opt for the TV, you're
not poor. (Derived from [1] above.) With over two years of energy literally
under your belt, paying off that cheap loan and earning far more, even under
adverse conditions, leverages you well outside poverty.

"Poor on paper" is unconvincing, given the opportunity for wise choices.

------
msluyter
I think it's time for the HN Automation Thread Template:

    
    
      P: Robots are taking our jobs!
        ~P: No, because of:
          {{ lump_sum_of_labor_fallacy }}  
          or
          {{ luddite_fallacy }}
          or
          {{ they've been saying this forever and they've always been wrong }}
           P: {{ various responses; invoke Martin Ford or Marshall Brain }}
             ~P: These guys don't know economics...
               while(1): 
                  P: hand wave, generalize from anecdotes, 
                     speculate in the absence of empirical evidence
                  ~P: hand wave, generalize from anecdotes, 
                      speculate in the absence of empirical evidence

------
DanI-S
When you think of the phenomenal potential of the human mind to feel, explore
and create (at whatever level the individual is capable of) the idea that most
of us should spend most of our time doing things we dislike is pretty
ridiculous.

My least favourite modern concept is the idea that everyone must have a job,
and that the most mind-numbing job is better than any alternative.

The most dull and incapable human is still able to feel joy, wonder and
excitement as powerfully as anyone else. Not all of us could spend our
technologically-driven retirement writing like Shakespeare, painting like
Monet and exploring like Richard Branson, but our average quality of life has
a very long way to go.

There's some residual puritanical disgust at the idea of living mostly without
work, but it's clearly going to become technologically possible in some number
of years. This post-scarcity world is when we're going to really be able to
shine as a species, even if our society will be radically restructured in the
process. Radical restructuring can be a positive thing - think of how much the
life of a woman has changed in the past 100 years.

------
barefoot
Being a (rational) software developer gives you an interesting edge un
understanding this stuff. I've been involved in the automation of a number of
things that have directly eliminated the need for human involvement and so
it's something I think about often as kind of a modern Loom builder.

It's chilling to think that even if the state of technology would stop today
that the level of automation would continue to rise rapidly. Every time I go
out of the house I'm struck by the how many humans are not really needed and
could be replaced with off the shelf technology that existed several years
ago.

I don't think that we need to get to the point of extremely advanced AI before
this starts making a dent in the economy.

~~~
rinkjustice
Automation is already cannibalizing the manufacturing sector. Productivity is
up yet employment is down dramatically. The assembly line worker is being
phased out forever.

Will new jobs in robotics/automation account for the old ones? Not nearly
enough. Aside from a few technicians on the shop floor, I think we'll
increasingly see robots building and designing other robots. Any humans that
will be involved in the process will be highly skilled and able to do so by
remote location.

Bottom line: if you're in the manufacturing industry, you're now in the
robotics industry.

~~~
eru
In a sense the age of robotics has arrived in entertainment a long time
earlier.

While nearly all machines in manufacturing required human operators until
recently, radio and TV are machines that provide their services directly to
the end user.

------
nopinsight
From my analysis below, especially on simple math about taxation and the
nature of democracy, it seems Martin Ford is wrong.

Suppose that the production of almost everything (clothes, furniture, etc.)
and most services is automated to the degree that the process itself costs
almost nothing, but still requires raw materials to produce. The scarce
factors would be raw materials, energy, and key human resources (product
designers, system engineers, roboticists, venture capitalists, etc.). (There
will remain certain services that are not automated, but these require only a
small fraction of the population to provide.) The main earners would be those
key people and the owners of raw materials and energy resources. We can
suppose they make up a small fraction of the population. These people will
earn huge income and can afford many luxuries of life. Some portions of their
income will be taxed and distributed to the mass.

Since much of the production and distribution costs will be eliminated, more
and better products/services can be provided. Let's say four times more or
better than in the current world. Even though the rest of the population
receive only a fraction (say 25%) of the income through governmental
distributive scheme, this could be equal to the total amount that the current
production creates. In a democratic country, political pressure will mount to
distribute enough income for everyone to be fairly satisfied with their
material well-being and something like 25% is a rate that the riches will
likely accept. Since the riches will comprise a small fraction of the
population, they will be pampered in a lot of ways, not unlike in the current
world. The key difference is that the middle class and the poor will become
one and the same since the jobs of most current middle-class would have been
automated away. (We are talking about the economic aspect, there might still
be differences among these two classes based on education, family background,
for example).

Overall, this would be a world where say 5% of the population designs,
analyses, manages, and faciliates automation, 10% provides services that are
not yet replaced by automation, 3% owns raw materials, 2% governs, and the
rest lives pretty well-off at least for non-competitive products. The 80%
might not get to own beach-front properties or products designed exactly to
their personal tastes (which require work from good designers), but they will
live materially better than most of us now. How they choose to spend free time
would be an interesting issue to explore. I am optimistic though that the
world where most people are free to pursue their own interests without needing
to work on things they don't enjoy will be a better world. I’d love to see
this actually happening sooner than later.

In conclusion, if the automation is significant enough to put the majority of
the population out of work, it will also likely create such a large surplus
that people will be materially better off through reasonable tax rates on the
productive workers and capital owners. A caveat that might ruin this utopian
scenario is in the case we and supercomputers in the future cannot find a way
to live sustainably given the raw materials and energy resources we have
access to from this earth (or other planets).

------
mkr-hn
I had to get this into an essay a while back to clarify my views on it:
[http://bitoftech.mkronline.com/2011/08/05/the-information-
ag...](http://bitoftech.mkronline.com/2011/08/05/the-information-ages-mid-
life-crisis/)

The short version is that once we automate away all the manual labor, our
cultural, economic, and educational priorities will shift to creative work and
curating civilization's creative output.

------
losvedir
It's a question of wealth distribution. Jobs have traditionally been a
relatively fair way of doing this. I put in effort to produce something in the
economy, my effort is acknowledged through some money, and I can trade that in
for the fruits of some of your labor.

The question in the article is phrased as "what about when people can't find
jobs?" However, when we get to that point, perhaps the question should in fact
be "what about when people don't need to find jobs."

If automation and technology in general continues to increase like this, at
some point we should be able to produce the equivalent of today's standard of
living with very little human input. Hence, our current framework that
incentivizes everyone to work becomes less necessary.

Should people be rewarded with a comfortable standard of living simply for
being human, even if they don't _do_ anything, in such a scenario? I tend to
think yes.

Here's my proposal: We implement a Basic Income Guarantee as a fraction of
GDP. It can be so small as to be negligible right now, but as human capacity
to produce increases, everyone reaps the rewards.

When we're so technically proficient that the Basic Income Guarantee is enough
to sustain yourself with a meager lifestyle, some may just not work and live
on it. Lucky them, for living in such an era, but that's something of a reward
that humans could have earned through increasing technology.

~~~
narag
I wonder if it would be healthy for the individuals and the society. Maybe the
problem is not how to keep people alive and well, but putting them to do
_productive_ work. So I find the proposed solution of creating _phony_ jobs
backwards.

------
yummyfajitas
The article makes an interesting, but flawed point: _The US is freaking out
simply at the mention of socialized healthcare, socialized work would be dead
on arrival...Ford’s solution requires that the wealthy consent to (or that the
public impose) increased taxes to avoid economic ruin._

The flaw is the assumption that taxes would need to be increased. In the
hypothetical world being described, humans have been more or less completely
replaced by robots. This is a world of staggeringly high productivity.

It's likely that in such a world tax rates could be extremely low, and
nevertheless the "virtual jobs" could provide enough revenue for all the
virtual job holders to have very high standards of living.

Similarly, the 2011 USA could easily provide large numbers of people with a
1911 standard of living even if tax rates were much lower than they are today.

------
coenhyde
Possibly but economic collapse might be necessary to rebalance our economy and
society to accommodate the newly freed labor. The labor force freed up from
factory work needs to be redistributed to some other industry; not necessarily
directly. We still educate people to be human robots but now we have real
robots so we don't need people for factory work anymore. What we need are
innovative and creative people for the cultural revolution. Ideally it would
be nice if this transition didn't require economic collapse but our society is
reactive not proactive.

~~~
xal
The point of the book is that the jobs that are likely to disappear next are
at the top end of the economic spectrum rather then the bottom. Think
Radiologists who will probably be replaced by software within a decade as
opposed to nurses who actually work with humans and are much harder to
replace.

~~~
arethuza
Interesting then that the Wikipedia article on Radiology says:

"The field is rapidly expanding due to advances in computer technology"

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiology>

So it sounds like technology is allowing them to do more things better rather
than simply replacing them.

------
xal
It's time that this book is being discussed more here on HN. A lot of topics
show up from time to time which discuss aspects of Ford's thesis. Typically
people who react in the affirmative that there is a problem are being
dismissed as neo luddites. Everyone who read Ford's book knows that it's not
that easy.

Even if this book is wrong, and I haven't found any good rebuttals, it's
important that as many smart people and current and future employers are aware
of the line of argument so that they can add the effect to their thinking
patterns.

------
Tichy
I've been wondering how we ended up having relatively low unemployment at all,
and have come up with a theory: it is because of automatic population control.
When people have good jobs, they tend to have more children. These children
are being born into a reasonably good economy. Sure, sometimes entire job
sectors broke away, but they average out (people in all job sectors do the
population control thing).

This could stop working in the future, because technological cycles become so
much shorter - much shorter than the change of human generations. Therefore
the reaction time of human birth cycles is too slow.

Also, in some countries social wellfare is messing with it.

Think about from the other direction: would the world support an arbitrary
number of humans? If 10 billion more humans would be dumped on earth tomorrow,
would we find jobs for them? I think we would struggle at least a bit.

I think the job of the future might be playing characters in MMORPGs. When all
physical needs are taken care of, people might resort to just playing games.
However, it will be entirely voluntary to offer jobs to people - there
certainly is no guarantee.

I used to be more optimistic because I thought the masses would stage a revolt
if their situation would become too bad. But I forgot that the rich will
probably also build fighting robots (self-shooting guns for building
protection are the first stage). So the masses might not have a chance
anymore.

------
danmaz74
Imagine that you bought a robot that, using no energy and no raw materials,
could produce all the shoes needed in the world, out of thin air. What price
could you ask for those shoes? Also imagine that your neighbor could buy the
same robot for the same price you paid it, let's say the equivalent of 1,000
times the price you wanted to sell your shoes at. What would happen?

Robots don't get paid for their "work"; it's their owners and their operators
that get the money. Moreover, robots don't vote, but workers do. Between
(imperfect) market competition and (imperfect) democracy, goods that are
created with very little human work and that aren't very rare will always
command very little prices compared to work-intensive goods, if the system is
given enough time to adapt.

So we could end up in a world where one massage by a (human) masseuse will be
worth 1,000 shoes. That wouldn't be such a big problem. The real issue is how
fast we get there: People need time to adapt, to retrain, to give different
relative values to different things.

What is really disrupting is a change that is too fast. But in the long run,
even if we'll all be dead, as Keynes said, it won't be automation that will
create world misery. On the other hand it could be a lack of energy to power
all those automatons, or of raw materials to build them, or of storage to put
away all the wastes they create...

------
floppydisk
Econ 101 says "Incentives matter." In this case, if we remove the incentives
to pursue careers in fields capable of being automatized (through automation),
we will see a rise in demand for and pursuit of careers not easily changed.

For instance, you might see less traditional blue collar workers and more
"robot maintenance" workers responsible for performing diagnostics and repair
on malfunctioning automatons. You would also see an increase in the number of
software engineers writing robot control software, not only out of demand, but
also as a fail safe to keep humans in the loop.

The economy wouldn't collapse, it would shift and adjust.

------
DanielBMarkham
Markets (and jobs) are driven by scarcity: I have something that you want. We
trade something or another so that you can have it.

This does not imply that I have something of tremendous value, or that is
necessary for you to stay alive, or that is cherished by all. Simply that you
want it, and I have it. It doesn't even have to be a tangible thing.

One of many huge philosophical problems I had with Star Trek: The Next
Generation was a future that was imagined without money. Best I could figure,
the idea being that once we reach some level, scarcity is no longer relevant.

This is ludicrous. Or, if it's not ludicrous, it supposes that we will reach
some state that has never before existed in any complex market system that
we've ever explored: a state of zero leverage. That is, even in a world where
you can snap your fingers and get anything, people are going to value those
who can think up the coolest things to make, right? In any world you can
imagine, there are always trades to make. That is, there are always markets.
To imagine otherwise would be to imagine a state of human existence that is
perpetually happy and never wants anything novel. Does that exist outside of
drug abusers and stagnant societies? Would we even wish such a life on our
progeny?

I wouldn't.

Don't get me wrong: I think we have many hurdles ahead, and the road is going
to get bumpy. In my future, mankind creates a new set of morals around what it
means to be human. Do I really want my every thought shared with the
collective? Every piece of data about my life to be available to everyone?
Fuck that noise. But to each his own. I think this decision about the role of
technology in our lives is going to be the turning point. Note that I'm all
for trans-humanism: bring on the nanotech and augmented bodies. Just never
take away my identity and value my own existence independently as something
worthwhile to all of us. We need billions of independently-acting free agents.
Not one hive mind.

But worst of all for this libertarian was where we ended up with in this
article: the same old bullshit of "Find a problem. Find an academic. Describe
the problem. Exaggerate a bit. Suggest some master plan for salvation." I have
seen this pattern of article so many times somebody needs to come up with a
name for it.

 _...we should take money from automating industries to fund a state guided
program that gives money to consumers in exchange for working at bettering
themselves. Sounds like a decent plan. Never gonna happen...._

Underline: we do not know how all of this is going to turn out. The entire
purpose of writing books like he has (and writing comments like I am) is to
_explore the problem_ , not get magic wands out and speculate on solutions. I
don't think we're anywhere near understanding what the problems are, much less
coming up with centralized systems for fixing them. And this is true in a lot
more areas that futuristic fear-mongering. It's wonderful that he took the
time to come up with some kind of socialized fix for a particular imagined
future-world, but the fix is a little bit too predictable for me [insert long,
drawn-out argument over the problems with these kinds of fixes]. I wish he
would have just left it off.

~~~
icebraining
In _Voyage from Yesteryear_ , the author (James P. Hogan) describes a post-
scarcity society. Quote from a summary of the book:

 _Since the availability of power from fusion reactors and cheap automated
labor has enabled them to develop a post-scarcity economy, they do not use
money as a means of exchange, nor do they recognize material possessions as
symbols of status. Instead, competence and talent are considered symbolic of
one's social standing – resources that cannot be counterfeited or hoarded, and
must be put to use if they are to be acknowledged. As a result, the
competitive drive that fuels capitalist financial systems has filled the
colony with the products of decades of incredible artistic and technical
talent, and there are no widespread hierarchies. No one person or group of
people can know everything, so no one person or group of people is expected to
speak for all. They have no centralized authorities; some would say they have
no government at all._

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Ouch. Did this author ever watch a gaggle of teenage girls purchase things?
"competence and talent" have very little to do with it.

That's why I mentioned the importance of not becoming a hive mind -- much
purchasing (and trading) is done as the result of social pressure, not some
futuristic idea of a meritocracy or even need. In the real world, with real
people, if we don't keep our minds separate, we'll end up in this huge common
mind where each little whim is judged socially, promoted socially, then
manufacturing and trading decisions are made for everybody at one time, then
on to the next thing. But even then, even in that terribly-imagined future,
immediacy becomes a tradeable commodity. You just can't get away from trading.

Quite frankly, it's easy for somebody who fancies themselves an expert (and
even I fit this category by pontificating here) to imagine some type of
meritocracy, usually with their own values as universal. Plato started it, so
he's in good company. But this is foolish in the extreme -- it assumes some
ultimate value system shared by all mankind, it assumes some metric for that
value system, and it assumes each individual would evaluate that metric the
same way at all times. This is just too much. Way too much. If anything, if we
continue to interconnect, it'll be social proof all the way down. Creativity
and competence will have nothing to do with anything.

At some point, no matter who you are, you need to expose yourself and your
ideas to those outside your little clique. Hence the importance of continuing
to discuss these types of problems. These ideas strike me as highly
provincial.

------
Cushman
Count me in the boat that says thinking about this now is too little, too
late. Will automation lead to economic collapse? What do you think led to the
present economic collapse? The economy as a whole has bounced back, like it
does. Why can't the people who were laid off find jobs?

You hear a lot of talk about welfare "paying people not to work"— I think that
neglects the fact that, in the United States, jobs _are_ welfare. The farmer
who "grows" your corn gets paid to sit in an automated combine all day doing
nothing. The factory worker gets paid to watch the robots all day to make sure
they're doing it right, and most of the time, they are. Even the computerized
desk jobs which are supposed to be the manual labor of our era: how many times
have you worked with someone whose job was to sit there all day copying rows
from one Excel sheet into another? How many times have you, as a programmer,
written a ten-line perl script which makes an entire division obsolete, and
watched as that division is tasked with the new job of running the perl
script?

There isn't going to _be_ another revolution; we're only incremental steps
away from these people having literally nothing to do. The farmer isn't going
to get a job designing combines. The factory worker isn't going to get a job
designing robots. The old lady in the office is never going to learn Perl, and
_no one_ is going to get a job flipping burgers or washing dishes or stocking
shelves.

They're going to go on welfare, or, if we haven't got our heads out of our
asses by then, they are going to starve to death.

~~~
eru
Your perspective might benefit from looking at the situation in other
countries.

~~~
Cushman
Unless there's a country where widespread automation has effectively replaced
all forms of physical labor, I'm not sure what you mean. Care to elaborate?

~~~
eru
I was responding to "The economy as a whole has bounced back, like it does.
Why can't the people who were laid off find jobs?"

There are other countries that also had a recession recently and don't have
such an unemployment problem, now. And there other episodes with long lasting
unemployed in other countries, too, without technology being to blame in the
way your post did.

So I don't think the current level of unemployment in the US says much about
technology.

Your argument about jobs being welfare is independent of that. I recommend
getting some hard data to see how prevalent that is.

So we do have enough resources to provide those goods right now. And if
technology marches on, like we are speculating here, it will take less of an
effort by the remaining tax payers. So it should be doable even with US levels
of taxation.

You would need to reorganize your public spending to make it much more
efficient, though.

(And I don't really think that level of welfare is necessary anyway, because
unemployment won't reach 80%.)

------
christkv
I'm curious but would not the move to automated factories in the long term
negate any cost benefit of making it in China and move the emphasis to cost of
transportation, energy and materials ?

With the rapid increase of wages in china and move towards more automation
there if automation is bad for the west imagine the havoc it will cause in
china.

~~~
lautis
When Chinese labor becomes too expensive, (some of) it will be outsourced to
Africa. Chinese economy seems to be in pretty good shape for this, but
political instability could ruin it.

Jobs moved to China are likely to be lost forever. Automation is still far
from autonomous: some human interaction is required.

Factory automation was a trend long before China become "capitalist". If other
costs are more important for some indistry, they wouldn't move to China in the
first place. Besides, for most production transportation costs using container
ships are neglible.

~~~
christkv
That's a theory I see a lot of people having but I'm not sure it will happen.
Africa does not have the stable governance of Asia nor the infrastructure to
support the rapid industrialization that China went through.

When it comes to transportation cost it would depend on oil prices going
forward.

~~~
lautis
I would guess that China will provide infrastructure to some african countries
in exchange for raw materials. Political stability will also improve as China
will support the regimes regardless of lack of democracy.

------
perfunctory
> The US is freaking out simply at the mention of socialized healthcare

Mass media and ensurance companies certainly are, But i don't think the
majority of population is. Besides, US is not the whole world yet, and the
book, afaiu, talks about the global economy.

------
johnohara
Our ability to overproduce seems nothing compared to our ability to overspend.
The great dilemma of our time lies in the debt relationships between us and
the ability to re-balance them of which automation might play a role.

~~~
eru
> The great dilemma of our time [...]

... in parts of the rich world.

------
chailatte
My theory is:

\- In 20 years, 80% of the people in will be kept alive by welfare,
supplemented by their hourly job. Enough to get a small apartment, utilities,
cell phone, cheap but unhealthy food, and shopping at the dollar store. And
free tv/movie/music/book/sports entertainment via the internet.

\- 15% will be the middlemen, extracting value from the others via service or
thievery. They will be the new middle class. They can afford the sometimes
luxury.

\- the other 5.5% will be specialized knowledge workers. They will be the one
maintaining the software/hardware to make sure nothing goes wrong. They can
afford lots of luxury, but will be taxed heavily, as they are the only
workhorse left in the society.

\- 0.1% will be entertainers. They will make sure that people are entertained
well enough not to riot.

\- and the 0.4% will rule everyone.

~~~
eru
I'd guess that the material welfare of the 80% will be far better than what
you described. Just their access to positional goods (e.g. social status,sea
front property) that is good where being better than somebody else is part of
their allure, will be scarce for them.

~~~
chailatte
I would say that's too optimistic. What I am describing of the 80% is simply
what is going on with the unemployed/underemployed (~16% today), the people on
food stamps (12% today) and the retired collecting SS without savings (~3%
today). I don't see why in 20 years, these people would have their welfare
increased to such a level that they can live a middle class life (a house,
nice car, good school for their kids, money to travel, visit to good
restaurants)

Unless you're saying the 80% kidnaps the government and made the rich and the
middle class give them more money. Which I can't see without massive civil
upheavel and the population reduction of those 80%.

~~~
eru
If, and that's a big if, you aren't a spendthrift you can live relatively
comfortably on European levels of welfare. That means living in a modern
apartment, car that gets you there (or public transport, which is actually
feasible in Europe), some travel. Schooling is provided by the government
mostly, and good schooling is not that much more costly to provide than bad
schooling. Move to Finland or Sweden, if that's your priority.

The food in good restaurants is not really better than in adequate
restaurants. Visiting a fancy restaurant is more of a positional good to show
and enjoy your social status.

Oh, and before I forget: Those central and northern Europeans countries are
not the countries that are currently in agonizing debt.

~~~
chailatte
Most European countries (just like the US) have been living beyond their
means, so I only could see a decreasing living standard from here on out. Look
at what happened to inner cities London as a precursor to most European
cities.

As for the few rich central/northern European countries, I do agree that those
on welfare will live nicely compared to anywhere else in the world. Sadly, its
quite hard for normal people to emigrate to those countries. And they won't be
immune to the collapse if they keep propping up the other failing countries.

I would say the fancy food phenomenon is only specific to US; good food can be
found anywhere in Asia and Europe. In US, the difference would be between
Denny's and a michelin starred restaurant.

------
aneth
I like the "virtual jobs" concept mentioned here. I recently wrote a post
addressing this issue as an urgent matter.

[http://blog.stacktrace.com/2011/08/16/end-of-employment-
eter...](http://blog.stacktrace.com/2011/08/16/end-of-employment-
eternal-20-percent-unemployment/)

------
stmartin
"Will MDA lead to the obsolescence of programmers?"

20 years later, I'm still waiting for an "MDA analyst" to put me out of a job.

