by: Bill Davidow

Call it the post-employee economy: The digital revolution is creating billions of dollars of wealth in a second world without people

When the disappointing jobs numbers were reported last week (employers added 120,000 jobs in March, about half the number reported in the two previous months), analysts tripped over themselves looking for an explanation. Of course, jobs numbers are bound to vary, but in my view the long-term trend calls for more jobs to disappear, and the reason is clear as day: the exploding Second Economy.

The Second Economy -- a term the economist Brian Arthur uses to describe the computer-intensive portion of the economy -- is, quite simply, the virtual economy. One of its main byproducts is the replacement of low-productivity workers with computers. It's growing by leaps and bounds, brimming with optimistic entrepreneurs, and spawning a new generation of billionaires. In fact, the booming Second Economy will probably drive much of the economic growth in the coming decades.

Unfortunately, the Second Economy will not create many jobs.

(Full Story...)

by: Gus Lubin and Michael Kelley

Gas prices may finally be cutting into American sprawl, as cities have started growing faster than suburbs and people are driving less than they used to.
 
So what happens if gas prices keep going higher?
 
You can't live in a cities like Merriam, Kansas without driving everywhere, as Maggie Koerth-Baker observes in Before the Lights Go Out.
 
We looked at the cities that spend the most at the gas pump, with 2010 data from consumer data site Bundle. You can imagine what will happen in these places if prices double, triple or worse.

(Full Story...)

by: Micheal Snider

The unemployment crisis in America is much worse than you are being told.  Did you know that there are 100 million working age Americans that do not get up in the morning and go to work?  No wonder why it seems like there are so many people that do not have jobs!  According to the federal government, there are 12.6 million working age Americans that are considered to be "officially" unemployed, but there are another 87.8 million working age Americans that are not working either.  The federal government considers those Americans to be "not in the labor force" so they are not included in the unemployment rate.  In fact, this is one of the key ways that the government manipulates the unemployment numbers.  The Obama administration would have us believe that the unemployment rate is going down and that that since the start of the last recession about as many Americans have left the labor force as we saw during the entire decades of the 1980s and 1990s combined.  Of course that is a bunch of nonsense, but that is what the Obama administration would have us believe.  The truth is that the percentage of working age Americans that are employed is just about the same right now as it was two years ago.  It was incredibly difficult to get a job back then and it is incredibly difficult to get a job right now.  So don't believe the hype that things are getting much better.  If you still do have a good job, you might want to hold on to it tightly, because there is not much hope that things are going to improve significantly any time soon.

(Full Story...)

by: Le Monde

With a quarter of the 3.3 million reported American home foreclosures, Florida exemplifies the human suffering, suburban rot and political confusion that have become legacies of the economic and housing crisis. —ARK

At some locations the misery is especially apparent. At Magnolia Court, a run-down apartment block in Orlando where the perimeter fence is a distant memory, two-thirds of the properties have been foreclosed. When a bankruptcy court has ordered liquidation, the owners wait for the sheriff to come.

Some apartments, purchased by real-estate agents for next to nothing, house tenants looking for the lowest possible rent. Others dwellings, empty and vandalised, have been taken over by squatters and drug dealers. Claiming to be the landlord, crooks extort rent from them.

(Full Story...)

by: Steve Lohr

A faltering economy explains much of the job shortage in America, but advancing technology has sharply magnified the effect, more so than is generally understood, according to two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The automation of more and more work once done by humans is the central theme of “Race Against the Machine,” an e-book to be published on Monday.

“Many workers, in short, are losing the race against the machine,” the authors write.

Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist and director of the M.I.T. Center for Digital Business, and Andrew P. McAfee, associate director and principal research scientist at the center, are two of the nation’s leading experts on technology and productivity. The tone of alarm in their book is a departure for the pair, whose previous research has focused mainly on the benefits of advancing technology.  More...

by: Porter Standsberry

The numbers tell us America is in decline… if not outright collapse

 I say “the numbers tell us” because I’ve become very sensitive to the impact this kind of statement has on people. When I warned about the impending bankruptcy of General Motors in 2006 and 2007, readers actually blamed me for the company’s problems – as if my warnings to the public were the real problem, rather than GM’s $400 billion in debt..

The claim was absurd. But the resentment my work engendered was real.

So please… before you read this issue, which makes several arresting claims about the future of our country… understand I am only writing about the facts as I find them today. I am only drawing conclusions based on the situation as it stands. I am not saying that these conditions can’t improve. Or that they won’t improve.

(Full Story...)

by: Terrance Heath

When 77-year-old Greek pensioner Dimitris Christoulas sat down under a tree in Athens' busiest public square and committed suicide — shooting himself in the head not far from Parliament, and leaving behind a letter blaming the government's austerity policies for driving him to it — his act launched protests in Greece, and became another example of the price  austerity exacts from those least responsible for and least able to pay the debts that austerity policies are intended to help the country pay. Christloulas's story offers a snapshot of austerity's consequences for the elderly, the young, the middle- and working classes, and just about everyone outside of the one percent — and not just in Greece, but right here at home too.
 
Despair
 
He was a retired pharmacist, who left behind a wife and daughter when he died. That one man, whose name no one outside of his family and friends had reason to know, could spark attacks on police and yet another round of protests in Greece speaks to how many Greeks identified with his plight. Perhaps only the location Dimitris Christoulas chose for his final act, and his decision to leave behind a final message set him apart from countless anonymous Greeks for whom austerity yielded nothing but despair.
 
Despair was not Christoulas's first response to austerity. First, he got mad. According to friends, Christoulas joined in protests against the government's austerity policies. He joined a citizens' movement against austerity, called "Den Plirono — which translates to "I won't pay." Yet, Christoulas did pay. The reality life under unyielding austerity took the fight out of him, and he gave up. Christoulas went out with a bang and one last gesture of outrage at Greece's government. But ultimately he decided that life under austerity was not worth living.
 
(Full Story...)