PBS has the story and video Should We Fear “the End of Work”?

The best parts of this story (or perhaps unique parts) come when they ask the fundamental question of how the wealth will be distributed. The part that is not unique is that many of the people who specifically think they are addressing this part of the problem spout nostrums that have little to do with solving the problem.

Educating every one to a very high level, does not automatically solve the problem. One person mentions that there are now half a million people writing apps for smart phones. This is supposed to be an example of the new jobs that will keep people employed. Yet, even this job can be automated. There will still be more people in the world than we need to create all the apps that everyone will want. We still need to figure out how people are going to be able to buy all the wonders that technology can produce.

There is a little more meat in the written article than there is in the video. Perhaps the following is the best we can expect at this stage of exploring the issue.

By now, if you’re feeling like the views expressed are all over the map, bewilderingly so, and wondering “okay, now what?,” I’m with you. The challenge for the American economy in the 21st century — how to compete successfully in an ever aggressive global economy and yet ensure that a wide swath of Americans benefit from that success — is dauntingly complex. We’re only just starting to grapple with what’s coming and what’s needed.

If there was a conclusion, it centered on the responsibility of leadership in society and its institutions — in not surrendering to a paralyzing sense of inevitability about the march of technology and the jobs it is trampling in the process. From his seat on Wall Street, Steven Berkenfeld targeted the business community:

“There is a real need for corporate leadership, and there is a need for accountability. When companies engage in productivity layoffs with record profitability, unprecedented levels of cash and all-time-high stock prices, no one in the media says, ‘Isn’t this terrible?’ No political leader speaks up to protest. We don’t hear anything from the labor unions. The companies are applauded for it because they’re cutting costs and improving profitability, and that’s supposedly what a company exists for. But it’s not that simple. They do have other responsibilities.”

Let me finish with Thomas Kochan’s plea for a renewed sense of national activism to forcefully change the course of an economy that just doesn’t seem to be working for the benefit of the vast majority of Americans. In Kochan’s words, it just doesn’t have to be this way:

“In terms of a market failure, it’s the reality that it’s not in the interests of any individual firm in the United States to try to solve the jobs problem. So, we’ve got to figure out a way to deal with that…and the only way that you solve this is by getting people and institutions and organizations to work together, to engage these issues collectively.

“It’s about an institutional failure over the last 30 years. With the decline of the labor movement, you’ve seen a lot of institutions go downhill equivalently. We don’t see the kind of dialogue, we don’t see the enforcement of our social norms and social policies that discipline corporations, and that really provided the kind of collective spreading of wage patterns and wage norms across the society.

“We’ve got to rebuild those, but we can’t try to rebuild them in an old-fashioned way. Now we’re in a more digital economy, a more knowledge-based economy, and we need to invent the new institutions that will cut across and aggregate these interests to address these challenges. We’ve got to get the education community working with business and employers, working with labor and civil society.

“I’m not a believer that technology is going to naturally eliminate jobs and cut income, but if we don’t do anything about it, if we just leave it, as we have, to individual market forces and to individual corporate actions and to individual technology innovations, then that’s probably where we are headed.

“If we don’t start to take the leadership,” Kochan concluded, “it isn’t going to come from anywhere else.”

The other change from the past that we need to account for is the declining dominance of the United States in the world economy. When the United States dominated and India and China were tiny economic powers, it was easier to solve problems on only a national level. Now with corporations able to move across international borders if they do not like the policies of a particular country, increasingly the solutions must be international.

You may not like the idea of international government, but the global economy is not asking whether or not you like it. It is just something we will have to deal with whether we like it or not. We cannot stop the trend.

Moneynews.com has the article Billionaires Dumping Stocks, Economist Knows Why.

I’ll pick out a few quotes so that you get the idea of what this story is about.

So why are these billionaires dumping their shares of U.S. companies?

It’s very likely that these professional investors are aware of specific research that points toward a massive market correction, as much as 90%.

One such person publishing this research is Robert Wiedemer, an esteemed economist and author of the New York Times best-selling book Aftershock.

So how do your know this article is a come-on?  This article is full of teasers for Wiedener, but the one thing that is totally absent from the article is any hint of where these billionaires are putting the money they reaped from dumping their shares.

Of course the following quotes are probably even more damning to the credibility of the article.

Wiedemer’s video interview also contains a comprehensive blueprint for economic survival that’s really commanding global attention.

Now viewed over 40 million times, it was initially screened for a relatively small, private audience. But the overwhelming amount of feedback from viewers who felt the interview should be widely publicized came with consequences, as various online networks repeatedly shut it down and affiliates refused to house the content.

Quick, get in on the secret that only 40,000,000 people know.  This secret has a conspiracy that is trying to suppress it.  Act on this secret news while you can still be the 40,000,001 person who gets in on the ground floor of this secret.

This information is commanding global attention that only you can be privy too.  Sounds like the maxim attributed to Yogi Berra about a restaurant in New York, “Nobody goes there anymore because it is too crowded.”  This information can’t be getting global attention and still be much of a secret.