End of the Current Economic Paradigm

I posted this as a reply to another thread here on ATS... after reading it again I felt it might merit it's own thread.

I think what we are witnessing overall is the slow painful end to our current economic paradigm. The way that most economies in the modern world work currently involve debt based money creation and a consumption cycle that needs regularly recurring infusions of debt to keep the world economy moving. Several factors have begun to unravel this paradigm. One of the main failings of the current model that you see being addressed is the fact that we are fast approaching a point globally where there isn't enough money in the system to pay the interest on the debt owed on a sovereign level. I think that is why interest rates in western economies have been held soo low.

Another problem that I don't think most people are aware of is that our current economic paradigm is not equipped to deal with the rapid technological changes we are seeing. New technological capabilities are wreaking havoc on our employment market. New technologies in some areas are replacing the need for human labor. In other areas rapidly advancing technologies are creating jobs we haven't had time to train people for yet.

It is in my opinion that we are probably already in a situation, (and have been for a long time) where we don't need the entire human race to work to provide for the entire human race. This is a thought I have trouble explaining. You see in our current economic system, one must work a 40 hour a week job and most of the time be in a relationship with someone else working a 40 hour a week job in order to maintain the necessities of life such as food, clothing, and shelter. The problem we are facing is that thanks to technological advance... our world doesn't need every human on it working a 40 hour a week job. Our economy is not equipped to deal with a scenario where labor is no longer required.

Imagine if you will the transition from historical farming methods and hunter gatherer societies to modern agriculture. We went from a situation and an economy where every member of a tribe or society had to either be involved in food production or food acquisition for the society to survive to a situation where only something like 2 percent of the world population is responsible for the food production of the entire planet. Now imagine if rather than allowing humanity to branch off into other specialties like entertainment and manufacturing the governments at that time, in order to maintain the status quo, forced everyone to keep farming and hunter gathering even though all of the needed food could be provided by a small percentage of the population.

What I think we are seeing today is that technology is completely replacing the need for human labor in many many fields. What the governments of the world are doing, is trying to maintain the status quo. Instead of changing the economic model to fit the new reality, they are trying to keep the broken system in place. You can already see that the majority of jobs are useless. Millions of people all of the world, if they can even find a job, work 40 hours a week in a useless job that could most likely be better performed by a machine.

reply to post by wisintel


I had actually come to this same conclusion along time ago - we are caught in a gap between the past/present and the future- our ingrained way of life is over

The scary part about this reality is the realization that people are being replaced by the machine and people are becoming the problem not the solution - so when you hear the conspiracy theorists talk about population reduction - it is very plausible- The people in power understand the masses are a burden - the few "workers" will have to support billions of mouths- and the numbers of mouth just increase thanks to the technology -

This future is actually rendering money irrelevant - it is now about ownership, power and those worthy to continue

I am sure that people are thinking - here we go again - but some of this TSA crap is just an exercise testing our collective will - they have to gain control of the masses - they have to take small gradual measures to show us mouths our place in society -

Just recently in the UK there were several "celebrities" saying the same thing - that we need to reduce the size of the population - but they all stopped short at how.

I agree that we're at a point where there are more people than viable jobs. Sure, you can employ lots of people to push paper, but is all that paper pushing necessary? No. As the UK Government announced in its spending review - 500,000 jobs are to go in the public sector; all those people were employed by successive governments of the past to reduce the unemployment rate.

If there is one piece of hope to come from this latest financial disaster, it is that people are realizing things are changing and can't continue as they have in the past.