But what if you go through all this and there are no jobs anyway? Some of you have already experienced this, trying to get summer jobs and there aren't any. What if adults are not as smart as you always assumed? What if the people who run things have a fundamental blindspot, right in the glaring middle of their thinking? What if they are "missing a chip on their motherboard?" What if managers and top executives really are as dumb as Scott Adams depicts them in his *Dilbert cartoon strip?
After all, with all this incredible technology, should we not all be living in heaven already? Why the holdup? Is there something real obvious in the way we set things up, day by day, week by week, that we're doing wrong and that if we changed ever so slightly, would make things A LOT better for ourselves and everybody else? What ordinary thing are we doing, every day and every week, that is screwing up our future? What little easy thing can we do differently every day that will make sure there are plenty of jobs for kids when they finish school, and maybe even during summer vacations before they finish too?
Some hints on the mind-rocking answer -
Hint 1 - we are not working in tune with any overall balancing mechanism that might spread work around - we're constantly bringing in more and more work-saving equipment and technology but we're not watching that the remaining work stays spread around so everybody can support themselves - and with all this equipment and technology, it should be getting easier and easier for everybody, I mean EVERYBODY, to support themselves at a higher and higher quality of life - if it isn't, we're being stupid in some really obvious way that the "experts" have totally missed.
In fact, we have absolutely no deliberately designed mechanism to smoothly and automatically keep the vanishing work spread around evenly. And this is not even saying anything about money - never mind the income gap and the weird and human-intelligence-insulting fact that some people have way way way WAY WAY times ten to the tenth to the tenth etc etc more money than they can possibly use or spend, while others, many more others, have way LESS than they need. This kind of imbalance, this sort of disparity, exists first and foremost in the work area. And it's a lot easier to correct in the work area than the money area, because when you take work away from A to give it to B, you're giving A something valuable back - free time - whereas when you take money away from A to give to B, it's not so clear what A's getting back. In other words, it's a lot easier to share work than money.
That's why minimum wage laws and living wage campaigns are too much too soon and doomed to fail. Work spreading comes before money spreading. It's a natural law (no relation to the Party of the same name). Try to share the money before you share the work and you just create dependency and clobber incentive.
The major obstacle that work sharing or spreading runs into is self-importance. People feel important when they're busy, when they have no time. They look down on those who don't seem to be in a hurry and push them aside. "Let me ahead of you, I've got more stuff to do!" Just watch people on the highway around rush hour. The ones weaving in and out of traffic to get ahead are trying to project "I'm really important." Sometimes these mobile timebombs are even on their car phone as they weave. The appropriate response, as you veer out of their way so they crash somebody else, is to open your mouth, nod dumbly towards them and lipsync "You must be a REALLY useful engine." (Apologies to *Thomas the Tank Engine).
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