Has the decline of knowledge work begun?

The vast majority of jobs that sustain our standard of living are blue-collar: farmers who grow our food, textile workers who make our clothes, construction workers who build our homes, plumbers, electricians, waste disposal workers, etc. I'd say it's white-collar work that became overinflated this past century, largely as a reaction to the automation and outsourcing of many traditional blue-collar roles.

Now, with white-collar jobs themselves increasingly at risk, it's unclear where people will turn. The economic pie continues to shrink, and I don't see that trend reversing.

It appears to me that our socio-economic model simply doesn't scale with technology. We need to have a constructive conversation about how to adapt.

The way I see it you only have two real choices:

1. Raise wages to match global increased productivity

2. Democratize ownership

That's it.

Democratize ownership it is.

Imagine an early human group of 40 people. If one person hoarded the food of 37 others and employed the remaining two just to guard it, it wasn't long before the ruse was up and there was a revolt and the food reclaimed.

Now, only because of scale and abstraction, basically the same setup is possible (0.1% owns as much as 50% of the population).

Our time is perverted ownership-wise, and it's time to go back to a truly cooperative society.

Cooperation, not hoarding, was the foundation of the beginning of civilisation.

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My ideal future resembles Star Trek: a world where money is obsolete (at least on Earth), and people pursue exploration, science, and the arts purely out of passion and curiosity.

A society driven by innovation, not profit.

I like that ideal, but it only comes about in abundance. Unfortunately, I think humans are programmed to rarely feel a sense of abundance because we innately desire social status. Social status is a relative metric, meaning it only exists in relation to others. This, combined with a greed impulse, renders a constant need for more. In other words, the human state often runs counter to a sense of abundance, and this seems incompatible with that ideal. I think that’s why capitalism, warts and all, has been an engine for progress.

The core issue seems that the social status is tightly coupled with currency and it can be optimized in destructive ways. Perhaps we need currency with multiple colours that could be earned in different ways and could be allowed to be spent to its sphere of influence as long as it could be enforced to not be interchanged. That way one could have higher social status in one sphere of influence and lower in another one.

William Storr has written about this and gives three different styles of social “currency”: dominance, virtue, and success.

Capitalism favors success and dominance over virtue, but some social subsets (eg clergy) get status through virtue.

I may have a look on William Storr later on. The separation of social currency does however seem rather primitive one.