Explanation and analysis of the idea of a 'post-employment economy', i.e. increasing corporate profits and decreasing employment, is given in 'The Lights in the Tunnel' by Martin Ford (which I found to be a good read, although a little verbose).
The main argument is that cheap computerized automation is displacing human workers, and corporate incentives are such that the trend is likely to continue. The long-term problem is that if systemic unemployment grows then the economy as a whole starts to flag b/c consumers no longer have the funds to drive the consumer economy.
His solution is rethinking corporate tax (reducing/eliminating pay-roll taxes which discentivize hiring, and potentially increasing corporate revenue tax). If displacement becomes extreme, he suggests that corporate taxes could fund a basic income for displaced workers to prop up the consumer economy.
I'm extremely pessimistic about any proposed solution that involves politics (changes to the tax code, basic income, etc), especially in the US. The populace at large doesn't have the interest or imagination to consider changing the game like that, and there's too much money mixed into the political system and the mass media to allow game changing ideas to enter the mainstream. (When I say "the game" I mean the political and economic system we've accreted, with its associated ideas about things like property and ownership.)
The only path out of this situation that I've ever been able to imagine that doesn't involve a swift, massive shift in popular consciousness is a gradual transition to worker control of capital. In other words, entrepreneurs found and grow worker cooperatives (a la Mondragon Corporation) that provide their services and/or goods preferentially to other cooperatives.
The pieces are out there to start doing this. There aren't any real legal obstacles to growing a new system inside the one we have now. For example, you can find pre-written C-corp bylaws online that spell out how a worker co-op functions and the ways it's protected from co-option by non-cooperative entities. It's just a matter of convincing individual entrepreneurs that it's not only a viable option but actually a socially positive (perhaps even necessary, in the long term) thing to do.
That's understandably a hard sell in the modern startup world where seemingly everyone is dreaming of astronomical wealth and willing to sacrifice every aspect of their life in its pursuit, but it should be easier to change a few key minds one at a time than to convince greater than 50% of the voting public that drastic changes need to be made.
I agree that currently the populace at large might not understand what is going on, but if structural employment continues to grow, then I think the nature of the problem will become more clear. In the limit, if the percentage of displaced workers becomes sufficiently large (>50%), then something like basic income seems to become politically tractable.
I do like the idea of worker cooperatives and do not know enough about them to understand if they are a realistic or preferable option to changing governmental policy. Do you have any good references related to the idea of cooperatives giving preferential treatment to other cooperatives?
By the way, here [1] is a very good resource on cooperatives in general. Don't be put off by the title (The Cooperative Solution: How the United States can tame recessions, reduce
inequality, and protect the environment) -- it's primarily history along with a survey of the cooperative economy circa 2012.
In general, the idea comes out of the Rochdale Principles [1], which most co-ops use as a sort of guide. The specific idea of giving preferential treatment to other cooperatives as clients/customers -- I don't know, that may have just popped into my head. But it seems like good strategy.
I don't see how this would solve the issue. The main problem is that we got too efficient. We make too many goods per capita. There's no enough work to employ everybody
Transitioning to cooperatives wouldn't fix that - we'd still have overproduction that would limit number of cooperatives and how many people they employ. More equal distribution of wealth may increase consumption a weee bit. But the core problem wouldn't go away.
I think you're saying that the core problem we face is that productivity per capita has gotten too high. One cause of increased productivity is that businesses are incentivized to compress their workforce as much as possible because labor is treated as just another input/cost. Viewed through that lens, an enterprise like a cooperative that actively tries to maintain its workforce is in effect holding productivity (per worker) in check, directly addressing the problem.
(That may put cooperatives at an inherent competitive disadvantage in the market. I haven't thought or read enough about that to have a strong outlook. But my gut response is that the challenge of providing a livelihood for your worker-owners is very similar to the challenge of providing a return to investors, and aside from an inability to perform layoffs, a cooperative is free to confront that challenge in the same way as any other business.)
Another way to look at it is that the benefits of technological advances would accrue to the worker-owners rather than the investors. So when their jobs get replaced by robots, the worker-owners just work less and share the profit from the robot labor, whereas in an investor-owned enterprise, all the employees are laid off and the investors share the profit. (And eventually there are no consumers for the product of the robots' labor because there's universal unemployment and investor capital is concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority, so you have to institute radical redistribution just to be able to continue to have any economy at all.)
Of course, the cooperative needs to have enough capital to actually acquire some robots when the time comes, so best start accumulating that capital ASAP.
I'd like to see this combined with GPL/Creative-Commons style infectivity. Some sort of charter that makes coops prefer buying from or selling to other coops, charge non-coops more for their services, etc.
The main argument is that cheap computerized automation is displacing human workers, and corporate incentives are such that the trend is likely to continue. The long-term problem is that if systemic unemployment grows then the economy as a whole starts to flag b/c consumers no longer have the funds to drive the consumer economy.
His solution is rethinking corporate tax (reducing/eliminating pay-roll taxes which discentivize hiring, and potentially increasing corporate revenue tax). If displacement becomes extreme, he suggests that corporate taxes could fund a basic income for displaced workers to prop up the consumer economy.