I’ve been saying this for over twenty years. No, we shouldn’t break the economy. But yes, government should exist to better the lives of its citizens, beyond simply ensuring safety and managing international or interstate relations.
Those basic functions were never supposed to be the ceiling of civilization—they were the foundation. Once stability and security were achieved, a wise society would turn its energy toward improving the daily lives of its people. Yet somewhere along the way, we took a hard turn. Rather than advancing human wellbeing, we began advancing the portfolios of the powerful.
The story of modern economics is, in many ways, the story of how the promise of shared prosperity was quietly rewritten into a mechanism for corporate and elite enrichment. Starting in the late 1970s, government policy, corporate lobbying, and media narratives began harmonizing around one idea: that the “health” of corporations was the same as the health of a nation. That if companies thrived, people would too. Decades later, that trickle-down fantasy has been thoroughly disproven, yet it still drives our policymaking.
Productivity has more than doubled since the early 1980s, but the average American worker has seen little of that reward. Instead, almost every gain from automation, globalization, and technological innovation has been siphoned upward into record corporate profits and obscene personal wealth. The gap between productivity and wages—once narrow—has become a canyon. Research from MIT, RAND, and the Economic Policy Institute all confirm what most citizens already feel: the wealth generated by their labor has been systematically redirected away from them.
Governments, rather than countering this, largely enabled it. Instead of using tax policy and social investment to spread progress, we deregulated, privatized, and subsidized the very entities least in need of help. The mission of “governing” quietly transformed into “managing markets.” Citizens became consumers. Workers became “human capital.” Every national achievement was redefined in terms of GDP, not happiness or health or rest.
And yet, decades of research show this was unnecessary. We have known for years that shorter workweeks and earlier retirements are not only possible but beneficial—economically and psychologically. Studies from Europe, Japan, and even early American think tanks revealed that reducing hours increases productivity, lowers healthcare costs, and improves civic stability. But rather than using technology to give people time, we used it to squeeze more output from them.
Corporations benefited twice: first from automation’s cost savings, and then again from longer working hours that drained workers without raising pay. Meanwhile, governments called this “growth.” And when people began to burn out, lose faith, or question the system, the solution wasn’t reform—it was distraction, division, and the normalization of exhaustion as patriotism.
Had we spent the past fifty years directing innovation toward human betterment instead of shareholder enrichment, our world today would look entirely different. The fear of AI or robots taking jobs would be absurd. We’d see automation as liberation, not competition. People would retire younger, live healthier, and spend more of their lives pursuing meaning instead of survival.
Instead, we now find ourselves staring down the barrel of another technological revolution—AI, robotics, biotechnology—without the social contract to wield it responsibly. The profits are already pre-assigned, the fear already stoked, the promises already broken.
It doesn’t have to stay this way. The path forward is not mysterious; it’s simply moral. Redirect progress toward the people it was meant to serve. A government that measures success by the wellbeing of its citizens, not the wealth of its corporations, would have nothing to fear from technology—and neither would we.
Because progress that ignores its people isn’t progress at all. It’s theft dressed up as achievement.
Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!
No comments:
Post a Comment