With all of this amazing technology being developed in the U.S. why is our economy in the toilet?

With all of this amazing technology being developed in the U.S. why is our economy in the toilet?


It's a bit complicated to explain my point of view on this subject, but in short, the economic model is becoming obsolete.

Regardless of what people have previously claimed, automation is doing away with jobs. Factories today have a handfull to a few dozen workers, whereas even in the recent past to have the same level of production required hundreds of workers. Internet and automated ordering services remove the need for secretaries and other customer service representatives. The list of jobs lost to computers keeps growing.

People can't pay their mortgages unless they have a job. When they lose their houses, and there is zero population growth, then no new houses are needed. This causes more people to lose their jobs because fewer trade and construction workers are needed, and fewer materials are needed so less minining or harvesting of lumber, etc.

Other forms of automation also remove jobs. When a modern lumber company can have one guy on a machine that cuts, strips, debarks, and stacks 100 to 180 trees per hour with just one operator, that's a LOT of jobs that have been lost.

Fewer and fewer people are required to produce the goods and services needed by everyone else. Normally, this wouldn't theoretically be a problem. However, the problem exists because those people who can't get a job because they aren't needed then can't afford to buy anything.

So even though there are a surplus of goods and services, 1/7th of Americans now live in poverty because they can't get a decent job, because their skills are no longer needed, or else because the job they have is considered "unskilled" and therefore doesn't even pay the cost of living, even though nobody else wants to do the job anyway.

"Haves" only pay "Have Nots" as little as they can possibly get away with, and charge them as much as they can possibly get away with...

It's a bit complicated to explain my point of view on this subject
No its not. Your assumption that the world is only as complicated as it can be for you to understand it, exposes both your mistrust of people smarter than you, and of the things which they may create or discover which you cannot.

And so saying something like 'trust me- its a lot more complicated than that' will have absolutely no effect on your perception that you know what is going on (you dont) or on your continued compulsion to leave posts which demonstrate the fact that you obviously do not.

Well put, quantum, but I guess I'm thinking with all this mind blowing technological advancement, it seems like their should be a new "Technological Revolution" (like the Industrial one)-that would revolutionize the world in the same way-and yet it doesn't seem to be materializing. I may not be articulating myself the way I want, I sound more like a Romantic, even to myself...