“In the 1930s, economist John Maynard Keynes suggested we were fast approaching a time when our new “labor-saving technology” meant we’d have to confront the issue of “technological unemployment.” Due to the prodigious gains in productivity, wrote Keynes, we’d soon be working half as much—or less. By the postwar period, this had become a widely held belief.”
Outside of the whole destroying the planet thing our species is doing this is what gives me the most societal despair. I grew up thinking this along with basic social safety nets would be the norm within my lifetime. Can’t say when exactly when it was becoming evident this was not the case but it was pretty evident by the new millenium.
Another thing I noticed with technology advancements. Is the free time it generates by simplifying tasks means jobs start snowballing responsibilities they shouldn’t have, to fill in the “extra time”. Which ends up in people doing some really weird jobs, they probably shouldn’t be doing or are unqualified for.
I see this a lot in Marketing where a “Communications” job is basically the work of multiple specializations and most of them don’t translate well. The descriptions of these roles is basically a shotgun blast of everything a Design Firm would do rolled into one person.
One thing that gets me since the double digits and is part of the enshitification is I notice more and more work is passed onto customers. I have more “paperwork” in this late computer age than I did when I was going through physical mail and writing physical checks.
From my perspective, the other shoe dropped right around 2000-2001, just as Millennials were going off to college for the first time.
The 90s were so heavily propagandized, we all thought it was smooth sailing ahead. Little did we know…
its like there were stages but post 2000 was when it was becoming more and more apparent. To me 70’s were sorta peak in terms of we still seemed to be going mostly in the right direction but things started to be dismantled in the 80’s and just keep accelerating from there. by the 20teens it just became impossible to ignore all the many problems. Im lucky as im an Xer. While I would totally jump on the chance to have been born older I completely see how it gets worse and worse. I sorta lucked out for my time period as I spent enough time in school were yeah I missed some good earnings time but it kept me from having children. I know folks who started making money and had kids in the late 90’s.
