The Radical Shift in Employment: Late Capitalism a Survival Guide

Thanks to our Patreon members for helping to make this episode possible and we're now available on all the major podcasting platforms. You can find more information at the links below. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Late Capitalism, a survival guide employment. Now, if you've been listening to the series up to this point, I'm sure you're aware this is not going to go well.

[laughter] And it's odd that it's not going to go well because here's the thing, most people like to work. I mean, people do like to do things. If you look around the world and even, you know, go back in time, people don't mind working. This is one of these given the opportunity, we like to do things.

And given the incentive of earning money, we like to do even more things. It's perfectly clear, by the way, that subsistence economies are are happy, but if they have the opportunity to make some money to buy some stuff that they couldn't get otherwise, they will work. People respond to the pay me, I do things kind of equation. This is not that confusing.

And in a free market economy, in theory, of course, we, you know, here we go. Um, you know, if you want more of my work, you just pay me more. And this is great. And the beautiful thing about that is when people work, this makes the GD they're productive.

The productivity produces goods. Goods are sold and traded and this creates economic activity. GDP go up, tax revenue go up, prime minister happy, president happy, working, productive people happy. Why oh why is there any problem here?

Oh my goodness. Are there problems? which of course we've all been feeling. We've been feeling this for a while.

Currently there is a pervasive sense I would argue you can you know argue back but I do believe that there is a pervasive sense both of cynicism and moderate despair all over the developed world and in other places about the employment situation. Workers feel insecure. They don't feel like their wages are keeping up with inflation. they're uh they you know they're the rapidly changing skill set that the the market seems to want the presence of AI all of a sudden will that take all the jobs maybe robots are going to take all the factory ...