Props to Richard Florida who, writing for Cato, is giving voice to some decidedly un-Cato-like worries:
As the U.S. loses another half-million high-paying manufacturing jobs over the coming decade to automation, improved efficiency, and outsourcing, its labor market is essentially cleaving into two distinct economic classes: high-skilled, high-paying creative work and much lower paying, low skill work in the service economy.
The task facing economic leaders of the 21st century is not simply how to spur technology and innovation, but how to recreate the large pool of high-paying but relatively low-skill jobs that were once the hallmark of our broad middle-class society.
If only Florida had followed that up with some sort of analysis or exploration of how to turn low-wage service jobs into high-paying positions. Unfortunately, he lapses back into a vapid encomium to "creativity," waxing orgasmic over Best Buy's willingness to adopt innovations contributed by their sales force. But Best Buy doesn't pay particularly well, as you can see its employees attest to here. Some folks make the minimum, salespeople make a bit more, supervisors net between $13-18. This is the model we're using?
It's rather laughable to discuss the future of low-wage labor without weighing the pros and cons of unions, or wage supports, or a guaranteed minimum income, or government intervention, or public benefits, or anything else. Instead, Florida ends his meditation with a warning that "[o]ur only path forward is to make the creative economy work for us—by undertaking regional, national, and global efforts to harness the creativity of each and every human being, aligning the further development of human creative capabilities with the further growth and development of our economies." Your take-home pay may not increase, but you'll be that much closer to reaching enlightenment.
