This article right here frames a lot of what I’ve been thinking about how we look at work and income in the new era. It seems pretty damn transparent that the Jetsons future means we all have to work less, but somehow that turns into “everybody has to have two side gigs through apps in order to make ends meet because we’re not going to give everybody a cut of the benefits that come from making work go away.”
The Democrats needs to be having this conversation right out loud, because a lot of the jobs like coal mining that people are rallying to a) were always shit jobs and should be done by robots, and b) aren’t ever coming back no matter how many brown people you treat like shit, rednecks. It’s not enough to say you’re going to retrain people, the work itself is going away. We need to see what that looks like and the people who are reaping the unexpected windfalls from work going away have to foot the bill for those getting left behind until we come up with a better scheme.
How hard is that to sell?