The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power and Status in the Twenty-First Century

Ryan Avent Wealth of Humans: Work, Power and Status in the Twenty-first Century New York, NY: St. Martin's Press, 2016In this well-argued book, Economist writer Ryan Avent lays out a bleak vista stretching forward as far as the jaundiced eye can see. What's mostly missing in this melancholy scenario is jobs. Looking back over the decades, the most insightful economists of the twentieth century just did not see this coming. What they did foresee was a steady attrition of all work susceptible to automation, globalization and other concomitant efficiencies coming on stream. Commenting during the bleaker thirties, John Maynard Keynes exhibited more than a little concern over what could happen to a future society inundated with a great surplus of leisure time to spend! Some of you may remember those fanciful, gee-whiz worries of decades past.But even if you count unemployment as a form of leisure, the surplus we really need worry about is inequality. Most essential commodities and many services are in oversupply worldwide. However, we remain far away from solving the social problem of distribution. In the oft-quoted words of science fiction writer William Gibson (2003), The future is already here; it's just not very evenly distributed. Because of the way contemporary society continues to organize itself, inequality, joblessness, gluts and the absence of meaningful growth continue to coexist.In the UK imprint of this book, the second half of the title reads Work and its Absence in the Twenty-first Century, which summarizes the author's theme. There is much more to say though than that, including surprises which may make you angry if you are not among the favoured few in the highest income percentiles. Among those surprises may be the discovery that automation and robotics are not alone in the systematic, structural replacement of skilled work. You might have to give way to other workers very close to home, but less protected or qualified. Paradoxically, a better educated workforce, once a rising tide to raise generations of good careers, has created an accreditation glut. Employers can demand higher levels of qualification for entry level positions, yet pay successful applicants much less than before. We've all seen this.The picture gets even bleaker. While job seekers contort their lives into mangled pretzels to look good on their resumes, others, whose only significant contribution to the world might be the inheritance of a strategically located tract of land or the chance purchase of an under rated block of shares, are arbitrarily set for life. Huffington Post (Tencer, 2016) reports that if you owned an average house in Canada last year, it probably earned more than you did. Rising housing costs destroy neighbourhoods, force endless hours of commute time and sooner or later hobble innovation. Workers compete against their own interests just to gain access to the wealthy, while simultaneously sliding downwards and away. Capitalists naturally collect exorbitant rents, in the broader, economic sense of the word, or make capital gains on every asset they possess or control and which everyone else really covets. They do this routinely because they can. You may despise such exploitive people, but your own success may require that you have access to them.Governments and central banking agencies often make unequal conditions worse without introducing real offsetting benefits. This can take the form of throwing good money after bad (supporting dying enterprises rather than investing in growing ones), giving large enterprises unconditional bailouts, and pursuing interest rate suppression-arguably the worst growth killer. When wages are depressed by low demand for labour, central banks are persuaded to keep interest rates low hoping to help the unemployed and underpaid subsist. In turn, investors sit on their money or turn to whatever high-yield low-risk opportunities remain. Unless an angel fund or public initiative underwrites needed riskier options, nobody goes there. …

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