Wal-Mart are struggling because
their customers can’t afford to buy
things. You need customers to drive
demand. And you’re not going to
have sustained innovation without
a market to inspire entrepreneurs”.
required, as a robot that adaptable
and diverse is still not possible.
But outside healthcare, it is not just
unskilled and manufacturing areas
of work that will be affected as
one might assume; but the people
right at the ‘top of the pile’ too. The
trouble is not just that people will
be out of work, but that those people will therefore not have money
to buy products, and if nobody is
buying, then the entire economy
can be affected. In an interview for
www.mercurynews.com, Ford said
of these issues...
Ford’s proposed solution to this
possible outcome is that of a minimum income for all (an idea that
has been touted by numerous different sources since the 1930s,
as Ford openly states), whereby
money at an equal ratio is simply
given to people, thereby still being
able to sustain consumerism even
if people are not directly involved
in an actual working role, to a certain extent. But this in itself poses
problems. There is the argument
that people who simply ‘spend’ will
become lost in a paradigm where
lives become structureless, and
the absence of a full-time job that
provides a system - no matter how
mundane - for the brain and body
to live by, will give rise to people
becoming miserable and frustrated
and lost simply because they’re
not doing anything. The financial
problem, as Ford attests, is clear,
but the problem of direction-less
“In order to have a successful
economy, even the people at the
top have got to sell something.
They need consumers for that. If
we really got into a situation where
most people just don’t have the
income, that could create a deflationary spiral, financial crisis, dragging the wealthy into it as well”.
“There’s some evidence inequality
is already undermining the economy to some extent. Businesses like
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