Automation has not triggered mass unemployment, despite concerns about increasingly-realistic innovations like driverless trucks and ATMs that can handle mortgages. But already, around the edges, robots are on the rise — creating cost savings that benefit corporations and Americans who run businesses. These benefits are increasingly going to a small group at the top.In fact, the income gap between the super rich and middle class has also increased at a rapid clip — by $58,800 between 2010 and 2015, as Bloomberg reported. And within the middle class itself, the gap between upper and lower middle class grew by $9,000.
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It takes a gallon of water to produce one almond. And that's not the most insane fact about the mad dash to plant the thirsty trees in the middle of a catastrophic drought.
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What he found was that—in the absence of a perpetually-growing economy—community and culture are key. He quotes, for example, the historian Juliet Schor’s view of working life in the Middle Ages: “The medieval calendar was filled with holidays …These were spent both in sober churchgoing and in feasting, drinking and merrymaking …All told, holiday leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one third of the year. And the English were apparently working harder than their neighbors. The ancien régime in France is reported to have guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days, and thirty-eight holidays. In Spain, travelers noted that holidays totaled five months per year.”
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Reading this took me back to a childhood fed by TV programmes like the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World, which had informed me that by now robots would be doing all the menial work, leaving humans free to relax and enjoy an abundance of leisure time. So it came as a shock to realise that the good folk of the Middle Ages were enjoying far more of it than we are in our technologically-advanced society. What gives? Fleming explains, “In a competitive market economy a large amount of roughly-equally-shared leisure time – say, a three-day working week, or less – is hard to sustain, because any individuals who decide to instead work a full week can produce for a lower price (by working longer hours than the competition they can produce a greater quantity of goods and services, and thus earn the same wage by selling each one more cheaply). These more competitive people would then be fully employed, and would put the more leisurely out of business completely. This is what puts the grim into reality.”