Day of Reckoning

Excerpt...

"Government leaders are even more quiet about a social and financial problem that is more immediate than the Social Security crisis and that probably dwarfs it in scope: what to do with the underclass. The nature of the economy has shifted so that unskilled jobs pay less and there are many fewer of them. Although the American has a remarkable record of job development, there are more than enough displaced workers, women reentering the job market, and immigrants to absorb the new vacancies. Companies don't run large-scale training programs to help the underclass, because, by and large, they don't have to. Inner-city schools hit or miss enough, that millions of young people emerge upon the world essentially hopeless. Whatever the future fluctuations of the economy, there is unlikely ever to be a place for them. There are large numbers of Americans for whom America has no meaningful place." - William Henry

Trust me, this is going to be the major problem of the next 30 years. Simply put, there aren't going to be enough jobs to provide a reasonable quality of life for increasingly significant amounts of people. Rifkin, a futurist, writes about this in The End of Work, and Friedman alludes to it in his new book (currently bouncing around the talk circuit). As this productivity phenomenon coincides with the current political trend to concentrate wealth in the elite (even more so than usual) inequality is increased. Which ultimately means, life for poor people is gonna get a lot rougher.