Thanks for an excellent column. I think that the people who claim that automation will create sufficient new jobs to solve the unemployment problem fail to acknowledge that those new jobs require much higher skill and education levels than the displaced workers have or can be trained to acquire or who don’t have the money to acquire.

I think that gov’ts will need to both identify those with raw talent in all social classes and pay for training those people. Additionally, the gov’t will also need to fund jobs for unskilled workers in areas such as elder care, cleaning public areas, day care, etc., in other words funding work that is useful but which cannot generate enough income to be self-supporting job as a for-profit business.

Essentially, economists need to get beyond viewing the sale and pricing of goods and services from the narrow confines of a two-party, buyer-seller transaction, to the overall, secondary and tertiary costs and benefits to the society/economic system as a whole of providing certain goods and services .

— David Grace