The following are now more or less consensus views on our current model of virtual bourse-fed globalist capitalism:
Prices fall but quality is reduced; offshore job relocation and automation destroy employment levels; service levels are cut to the bone; physical retail jobs disappear; social and healthcare budgets are cut; trickle-down wealth is nowhere near enough to retain mass consumption levels; recession and deflation are the inevitable end results; short termism reduces vital investment in everything from energy innovations to arts creativity; and cash-strapped governments are forced to turn to unelected money in order to survive.
Multiple retailing’s development after 1962 ensured that the life would be ripped out of small communities. But the internet has so trashed the physical retail model of distribution, our community high streets and village shops will soon implode….and even some multiples will go bust in the end – eg, Tesco.
The ISP rejection of call centres in favour of online automated after-sales ‘service’ has ensured the loss of millions of telephony jobs worldwide.
A report from the Oxford Martin School’s Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology concluded last year that the next the next two decades will see 45% of America’s workforce replaced by computerised automation.
Lost jobs in a welfare-based society are expensive. The policies we’re following are decimating jobs, and reducing tax income/welfare payments. Thus…
Nearly a quarter of the Crown’s state prosecutors have been cut as part of budget savings, leaving many in the justice system, including senior judges, expressing grave concerns about the state’s performance in some criminal trials.
Neoliberal mass-production globalism is dysfunctional on almost every dimension. It increases inequality, destroys communities, threatens liberty, trivialises democracy, and dilutes the most fundamental principle of civilisation: the equitable Rule of Law.
The Slog 