Summary
The world's more advanced economies and their societies are facing crises posed by the competition of vast pools of low-wage foreign labor and by the aging of their populations. Globalization has caused low-wage foreign labor, some of it of excellent quality, to come into direct competition with the firms and workers within the advanced economies through imports, offshore production, outsourcing and immigration. The result for many individuals and firms within the developed societies is growing economic displacement, a struggle for economic survival, and downward pressure on salaries, wages and living standards. At the same time, the populations in the developed societies are growing older, raising the question of how an evergrowing number of the elderly are to get by in a time, soon to come, when there will be relatively few working-age adults. Further, the West faces demographic swamping by the waves of immigration, both legal and illegal. Solutions for all of these problems are hard to come by, but one that is receiving increasing attention is for the advanced economies to turn their reliance primarily to their capital. They can do this by accelerating their development of non-labor-intensive technologies and business processes. The growth of robotics looms large as perhaps the preeminent future form of such a technology - one with far-reaching social implications.
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Robotics: A Route to the Survival of Advanced Societies?
In Thomas Friedman's phrase, the world has "become flat." The advance of modern communications and transportation and the international flow of capital have put the world's enormous pools of low-pay workers right "on the doorstep," so to speak, of the advanced economies. Imported goods made cheaply, the use of outsourcing and offshore production, and a long-continuing flood of immigrants from throughout the world have made it difficult for firms to survive if they don't themselves join the rush toward low-cost labor. For their part, individual workers are pressed into increasing competition with that labor, which commands neither the salaries nor benefits that workers in the advanced economies have so long received. During all of this, an important palliative is that the low-cost goods keep inflation in check for items they include and provide a boon to consumers, even as the central bank's policy of increasing the quantity of money stimulates the stock market. The most salient fact about it is that it is no longer labor that receives significant remuneration, but capital, since it is capital that is able to harness the global pool of low-cost labor.
At the same time, the populations of the advanced societies are growing older and are shrinking (if immigration is not counted) because of below-replacement birth rates. Unless a society allows the entrance of large numbers of immigrants, there is the looming question of "who will do the work that will support a largely elderly population?" In the absence of an alternative, this would point toward even further immigration.Moreover, the immigration, amounting to a flood, poses a virtual certainty of demographic swamping that over time will transform the societies of the West (which are the ones that permit and often invite the influx) beyond recognition. This amounts to an existential crisis for the West, which will within a historically short time cease to exist as such.These crises may seem insoluble (except to many adherents of a now conventionally-held reductionist free market ideology to whom everything is acceptable if it arises out of market transactions). One prominent analyst, speaking in the context of the threat that all of this poses to Europe's "social safety net," has written that Europe has "three options: trillions of dollars in new tax revenues must be found; European women must begin ...See the full content of this document
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