Remember when "they" told us how great the future would be?

After WWII, there was enthusiasm and longing for the future.. Our lives would be a snap! We would have every newfangled gadget we could imagine. There would be machines to wash our clothes, do our dishes...machines to entertain us...amchines to look inside our bodies and cure us..

People were hopeful and exhuberant as they anticipated the next great thing.

Our houses would be bigger, our cars would be bigger,the fantastic new roads beckoned to us.. and since machines would take over a lot of the mundane chores and jobs, we would all have more leisure time.. Of course, the jobs of the future would all be highly paid, technical jobs. so we would just love going to work.. We would use that extra time to travel, and enjoy life.


What "they" forgot to tell us.

As machines moved into the workplace in a big way, and workers were displaced, there was no massive retraining, as we were led to expect. Education started to slide backwards intstead of forwards. People may not have had the long hours in back-breaking, boring jobs that they once had, but instead of moving up, the "common man" has retreated.

Not EVERYONE can or will go to college. These "Brave New Jobs" we were told about were for the "smarties". The ordinary folks are still doing the old jobs they always had, only NOW those old dirty jobs are non-union, under-appreciated, and can no longer support a family.

Blue-collar labor that pays well is scarce these days, and as newer technology did provide new and often exciting jobs, the need for the sheer numbers of workers has not kept up. Every new technology has its "cutting edge" people, but once it becomes mainstream, it's immediately devalued and priced downwards, taking the workers with it. Workers are now faced with the need to constantly "upgrade..train..and re-educate". The days of learning your job, and then making a career doing what you "know", are gone forever.

Is it any wonder why some people crumple under the stress of it all?

Corporations and conglomerates have replaced "companies", "factories", "businesses", and lots of workers suffer from the fact they they are always expendable...always replaceable.

Life is little more than a gigantic game of Monopoly, only since we are the pieces, we never get a turn. We are just moved along the board as the dice are rolled.

As jobs get less labor-intensive, and "place-sensitive", we can expect to see more and more of them just gone. The people who "used" to do those jobs are still here though, and unless they are very young and single, their American Dream is dead.

Real wages and standard of living have fallen for DECADES, yet all we see around us is the message to consume more... move up...

Our societal safety net is being snipped away and more and more of us are falling through the gaping holes.

The fundamentalists decry the lapse in morals and the increase of single-parenthood, but they never look behind the curtain. There are causal effects that have taken a long time to occur. It all boils down to jobs and education.Instead of creating MORE jobs for the increasing population, we are just creating a whole new underclass of people who will always be unemployed or underemployed, because there are fewer and fewer jobs available to the masses. Unemployed people are stressed people who have a hard time coping with life. Children learn what they live, so the cycle is likely to continue.

I always thought the machines doing the crap work would free the humans to work shorter hours at more interesting jobs for the same money, a living wage with benefits. Boy, was I a naive ten-year-old.

:)

the completely automated house

Back in the 70s Toffler predicted it happening.

We'll get through it and on to the good stuff, so just hang in there.

I hope you get more from YOUR future than I did from mine :(

you're just depressed. It'll pass

Glad to see you're still dispensing the meaningless globalist platitudes, Maple.

...of that shiny future. 2000 turned out to be the breakthrough year for the police state.

And no flying cars, dammit!:(

In case you haven't noticed, most white-collar jobs pay even LESS than the traditional blue-collar jobs like plumber, electrician, mechanic or auto assembly line worker.

Most people are just on that treadmill...running in place..

Get a 5% raise?? oops your healthcare just went up 8%, and gas doubled :(

Those skilled labor jobs pay well, but they're dependent on the real estate/housing market. If housing/real estate goes bust, many of those jobs do so as well.

Standing tough under stars and stripes
We can tell
This dream's in sight
You've got to admit it
At this point in time that it's clear
The future looks bright
On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
Well by seventy-six we'll be A.O.K.

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

Get your ticket to that wheel in space
While there's time
The fix is in
You'll be a witness to that game of chance in the sky
You know we've got to win
Here at home we'll play in the city
Powered by the sun
Perfect weather for a streamlined world
There'll be spandex jackets one for everyone

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
(More leisure for artists everywhere)
A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We'll be clean when their work is done
We'll be eternally free yes and eternally young

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

--Donald Fagan

And I'm old enough to remember the early- and mid-'60s, when such predictions were commonplace, and I truly expected to be living in a world of such wonders when I was old (like, you know, 45 or so).

:eyes:

Our lives would be a snap! We would have every newfangled gadget we could imagine. There would be machines to wash our clothes, do our dishes...machines to entertain us...amchines to look inside our bodies and cure us..

People were hopeful and exuberant as they anticipated the next great thing.

That does not sound like a good foundation for healthy, sustainable, and equitable communities and cultures. The growing disconnect from the community of life that ultimately sustains us, and the general disconnect from each other is a serious side effect of this consumer vision. One that if left uncorrected will be the downfall of modern civilization.

The consumer dream blinds us to the negative effects of our lifestyle on ourselves, each other, and the world. It drives us as a culture to gobble up the world's resources for short term material gain to the detriment of future generations and our neighbors in the community of life. It creates schools that teach us to be producers and consumers, while forgetting to teach us to be participants. It turned wilderness, caring for the sick, educating the young, friendship, love, death, and everything else sacred into products.

Sitting at the top of the civilized world's hierarchy, living off the backs of and plundering the resources of people half a world away will catch up to us eventually. It is not sustainable. the world bank, the IMF, nukes, military industrial complex, prison industrial complex, rain-forests, redwoods, co2, mines, irrigation, Peak Oil, ANWR, genocide, water wars...

The dream of a world under our control and doing our bidding is a giant hoax. It is an illusion. We are not rulers, we are participants of this wondrous sacred experience.

It's the rotten carrot on the end of that stick..always just out of reach..

:(

if we were going to have more and more "leisure time"...and i never got a real answer.

i was from a blue-collar family background.

What "they" forgot to tell us.

As machines moved into the workplace in a big way, and workers were displaced, there was no massive retraining, as we were led to expect. Education started to slide backwards intstead of forwards. People may not have had the long hours in back-breaking, boring jobs that they once had, but instead of moving up, the "common man" has retreated.


Uh, no. "They" were mostly right -- what happened was corporate greed in a BIG way, and I mean REALLY BIG way.

What *I* remember, in the late 1970s, was the move toward computerization and roboticization in factories, etc., and labor deathly afraid of that and fighting it every step of the way. They needn't have -- what came after was a period of remarkable prosperity (even considering Reagan and his wrong-headed economic policies). The growth of the computer industry more than made up for the "lost" jobs to computerization and roboticization -- even if they weren't exactly equal tradeoffs (IOW, if Joe Smith lost his factory job due to the shift, he didn't necessarily get to switch directly to a computer job). Even so, the "displacement" in the workforce was more than made up for in the

Meanwhile, those who were promoting computerization, etc., promised us lives of leisure. The increase in productivity would enable us to work 3 days a week and have an even higher standard of living.

And indeed it COULD have. Except that there is nothing like the word "enough" in corporate circles when it comes to profits. The bounty got snarfed up by the capitalists. The boon in productivity that was promised to the workers never got there. Why? Because the capitalists saw that they could take it for themselves, and did.

Another shift from the 1970s when values like "good corporate citizens" were firmly in place. We actually used to have articles and even books listing various corporations and ranking them in terms of their treatment of minorities and women (incouding providing things like childcare as well as promotions, etc.), their treatment of the environment, corporate giving to charities and the arts, etc., etc. NO MORE!

What happened? The 1980s, and I THINK Harvard Business School (as at least one, probably major factor). I'm talking about the development of the notion (value, actually) that "the only responsibility of any corporation is to create profits" which gave rise to such lovely sentiments and proclamations as "Greed is good." So corporations went from being "good corporate citizens" to being basically sociopathic. They abandoned any semblance of interest in promoting the common good, or participating as anything but rapacious users and abusers.

Enter the heads of large multinationals who not only aren't particularly interested in various local venues where their plants, etc. may be situated, but don't even have loyalties to the countries in which their headquarters or other major offices may be based. Enter globalization, NAFTA, etc., and the

I think ultimately, gloabalization is inevitable and will serve the people more than the capitalists (especially to the extent that The People can organize across national borders, etc.) -- but we've already seen a lot of negative fallout and it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

Anyway, this is from my own personal observation and speculation. I don't have any facts and figures to back it up. It's just what I saw living through it.