Bernard Lietaer - The future of money

that his factory workers could buy it, he put in motion a virtuous cycle between more can, more workers, more cars, more workers.

Jobless growth may very well turn this virtuous cycle into a vicious one, operating in the other direction. Every time people are laid off, or are forced to reduce their income, they are going to drop out of the market for at least some of these great new widgets that the corporations keep producing. Even if each corporation is better off at each step, the total market pie is shrinking, so cumulatively we may suddenly find everyone worse off, even the corporation itself.

The fact that this is a global game further complicates the picture.

Plants that are being built in the Third World use technologies, which are just as effective as those applied in the First World. And a decade of 'structural adjustment' policies implemented by the International Monetary Fund have stripped away many of their skimpy social safety nets as well.

Keynes’s foresight John Maynard Keynes, in his Essay on Persuasion, predicted over sixty years ago with remarkable foresight that a time would come when the production problem would be solved, but that the transition was likely to be a painful one: If the economic problem [the struggle for subsistence] is solved, mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose. [. . .] Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced by his real, his permanent problem [...] There is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and abundance without a dread. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots to the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society.