Davos diary: A new sense of dread is settling over the world's elites
Source: The Globe and Mail
... Once again, the argument between creative destruction and state-funded stability is the talk of policy-makers, who have woken up to a new year of economic growth around the world and yet a dreaded sense that this global expansion will not bring nearly enough jobs and wage increases to satisfy any public.
... The talk of one Davos session this week was 3-D printers for housing. A prototype, it was claimed, is already printing small houses fit for human habitation. Within five years, the entire construction industry could be replaced by a phalanx of printers. Goodbye, a million construction jobs. Hello, a thousand code-writers.
... For all the talk of growth, though, the global economy is also in an employment morass that has the smartest people in the room humbled and anxious. The rebound is not producing jobs and pay increases to the degree that many of them expected. Most governments are tapped out, fiscally, and can only call on the private sector the innovators to do more.
... The new digital divide it used to be about access, now its about employment stands to further isolate the millions of long-term jobless people in Europe and North America, many of whom have left the workforce and wont be getting calls when jobs come back.
Read more: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/davos-diary-a-new-sense-of-dread-is-settling-over-the-worlds-elites/article16500943/?page=all
roguevalley
(40,656 posts)revolution. As they mess around with the deck chairs, the titanic is sinking. And they won't be hard to find. They live in the big houses.
fasttense
(17,301 posts)Do they have any idea how much they are hated? Are their bubbles so thick that they can't hear the screams?
When the mobs come, they will act all surprised.
Kablooie
(18,571 posts)An uprising would be as successful as the Iraq or Afghanistan rebels are.
Storming the Bastille won't cut it anymore.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Which will lead to robotic armies.
fasttense
(17,301 posts)did not stop the Union movement.
In 1921, in the battle of Blair Mountain, the US dropped bombs (one of the most sophisticated weapons of the times) on striking Union workers. Yet the workers won in the end. So, I do honestly believe that an uprising will win in the end.
snot
(10,478 posts)never seem to consider the possibility that greater productivity with less work could mean that everyone works less and still has a good income.
Of course, that won't happen unless we make it happen.
MrScorpio
(73,626 posts)Creating a vast amount of personal wealth for themselves. However, that doesn't mean that those skills are also applicable for the needs of managing the global economy.
They've been at it for all of this time and they can only admit to the point that things are going wrong. Yet they refuse to admit that perhaps that they themselves are ultimately responsible for causing these problems for the world. By promoting a global economy whose primary function is to create a vast amount of wealth for themselves, at the detriment of everyone else, this is actually at the root of the problem.
It's something that they're utterly incapable of understanding and, if it were told to them, they would refuse to listen.
The answers must lie somewhere else, thus they elaborate on solutions that would not address the real problems and would only create more.
Which would be addressed at next year's round of talks. This creates nothing more than a vicious economic tailspin that will cause all of us to circle the drain.
rug
(82,333 posts) the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?
Two things result from this fact:
I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.
II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.
To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm
Herself
(185 posts)We will have brand new cities, beautiful cities built and waiting for people
and no one can afford to move into them, just like China.
Oh, the irony of it all