Has the bubble of unnecessary work burst?

Put the minimum wage up to a realistic (TCO life supporting) level.

Declare more public holidays.

Then give the unemployed shovels and pay them to make something with real cost and labor saving capital value.

Or go back to basics and get them to plant trees, clearing out atmospheric carbon and building a store of sustainable energy.

Repeat for each financial crisis until we have so much labor saving that we can all work only for as long as we need to relieve the tedium of leisure.

prior to 1975 the ratio was about 75%.

In the 1975-95 productivity slowdown it was about 50%.

But since 1995 it has been some 90%. this means that a one percentage point increase in GDP only generates a 0.1% increase in employment.

1. Walmartization. Henry Ford is alleged to have paid his employees well so they could afford to buy cars. The Waltons pay their employees a pittance so they can afford to shop nowhere but Walmart. This is not a limited phenomenon in America. Minimum wage — no benefits — dollar stores — becoming the norm.

2. Productivity capture. Futurists in the late 60s and 70s predicted that productivity gains would lead to a 21st Century America beleaguered by an excess of leisure time and distributed wealth. They were right about the productivity gains, wrong about who would benefit. Productivity gains have been captured by the very wealthy, while working Americans work longer hours for lower wages. One might want to consider this when thinking about the structural causes of decreased demand, lackluster job growth.

3. Off-shoring. Production is sent overseas. Profits are sent overseas as investment in production overseas.

Where’s the demand, where are the jobs? Well, as the result of private and public decisions made over several decades, the American economy is being gutted, jobs sent overseas, wages driven down, returns pipelined to the top. This big structural jobs question doesn’t look all that mysterious from down here in the trenches.