Ross discussed why does it feel like the USA and Canada are becoming a Third World country despite the fact they’re not in the previous post. This is the continuation of his discussion.
Expectation – the world is getting worse? I can’t get ahead
And there’s this expectation. The world is getting worse and I can’t get ahead, just stated simply.
So there’s safety and security become felt issues in many places in the world. And employment is felt issue. And the pace of change, yeah the technological change, well, will I even have a job?
If you’re in college or you’re a young people or you’re at college, the cost of that you’ll be only too well aware of it, there’s that question, will there be jobs for my children? And that’s a question for every generation.
Ongoing wars around the globe and of course everything’s magnified by the media or internet now, and then civil issues, and then inequality.
This graphic here is a veteran, a US veteran out selling newspapers trying to make ends meet. And he’s been injured or something, he’s in a wheelchair and your instinct of reaction is hey, something’s not right here. You know that shouldn’t be the case.
But good on him for actually getting out and doing something but this is the sort of thing we’re talking about the expectation and affects inequality as well.
Reaction – Technological Revolution, Recession, and War
The other thing is we’re getting a reaction going on to the technological revolution combined with the recession, combined with lots and lots of wars going on around the globe.
And I think you’re going to look back to the Industrial Revolution of 1760 – 1840 to get a similar effect.
And no doubt everybody has heard of the Luddites, they were English skilled textile workers. In fact, they were a bit like infrastructure managers or engineers or people like that.
They were skilled artisans in their society and they rioted and broke machines in 1811, which if you look at it from 1760, a fair old while, its 51 years later but they felt that their entire lifestyle and everything was under threat.
And the graphics there is a British government propaganda picture of a Luddite, it won’t be anything like that what they actually looked like.
They’ve tried to make him a little bit Scottish because that’s the old enemy to the UK or to the English. And they got rounded up and they got executed essentially for sedition and for treason.
So we’ve had this technological revolution from the 1980s and the internet age starting in the 1990s. And it’s causing massive and ongoing structural shifts in society. Jobs are disappearing. Different jobs are getting made.
Right at the moment, this is a worldwide phenomenon, Pokémon GO going on, which is a virtual reality type thing.
And who would have thought of that 20 or 30 years ago and tens of thousands of people will be playing it all around the world?
Add to that, 2008 to 2016 a massive worldwide recession. While the recession might have been a bit shorter than that but the effects have certainly been that period from 2008 to 2016.
Eight years of ongoing wars with the megaphone effect.
And what it does is it creates very high societal uncertainty, which again feeds into that feeling that everything is not right.
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