Posted by Bob Lord
Ross Douthat is one of the conservative journalists I try to follow. I find him insightful, even if I often don't agree with him.
In Saturday's Times, Douthat explored territory where no politician, D or R (or even L or G) dares to go: The possiblity that our economy may have matured past the point of providing jobs for all. In A World Without Work, Douthat acknowledges the reality of fewer jobs to go around:
Yet the decline of work isn’t actually some wild Marxist scenario. It’s a basic reality of 21st-century American life, one that predates the financial crash and promises to continue apace even as normal economic growth returns. This decline isn’t unemployment in the usual sense, where people look for work and can’t find it. It’s a kind of post-employment, in which people drop out of the work force and find ways to live, more or less permanently, without a steady job. So instead of spreading from the top down, leisure time — wanted or unwanted — is expanding from the bottom up. Long hours are increasingly the province of the rich.
Douthat correctly notes that the loss of jobs is not jeopardizing wealth creation, but actually is the result of it:
