Elliott's Singer On America's "Insidious And Life-Draining" Dependency Culture

The employment situation in America is in a state of serious dysfunction. The problems existed before the 2008 crisis, to be sure, but they are getting worse, and the current Administration’s job-related policies are seriously deficient. Most parts of the developed world are facing similar challenges, but our focus in this section will be on the U.S., where the labor participation rate has reached a 40-year low. This is a nasty statistic, one that reveals the published unemployment figures to be a deception. In reality, five years after the crash, unemployment remains at recession levels. The fall in the labor participation rate reflects the perils of long-term unemployment, which turns millions of workers into unemployables as their skill sets rust with disuse and their attractiveness to employers diminishes.

One element in the long-term jobs picture is the march of technology. The technologies that are chewing up jobs are actually accelerating in their efficiency and their ability to perform tasks previously done by people. The fear that technology will make workers obsolete predates the industrial revolution, but the future will likely prove that this is only partially true. Technological advances may not be the death of employment, but they will require seriously creative policies to counteract their negative effects on jobs without impeding overall growth. We believe that this can and must be achieved.

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