A very great many people in the US are homeless, unfortunately. More all the time. Its particularly tragic how a growing number of children are homeless. Nowadays, statistics are telling us that one in seven children in New York City public schools is homeless, for at least some of the school year.
In my opinion, what's happening is basically a sea change, a transition in the nature of much work. We're devoting a lot of energy into saving labor and its succeeding. Experts in computer science estimate that around 40% of our jobs, globally, are likely to vanish due to automation within the next few years. Then an additional 40% of today's jobs in developed countries (mostly office jobs) may shift to lower cost countries and be done over the Internet as a "bridge to automation". This is claimed "will make business much more profitable" because of reduced costs. However those making these rosy estimates in Washington, Brussels and Geneva fail to take into account the global loss of customers due to wide scale unemployment. Also, I think they are overestimating economic growth in developing countries. (They are making the assumption that wealth there will be shared, leading to increases in consumption of Western-originated products. I think this assumption is faulty, I don't think that wealth gained there will be shared, so I don't think its worth trading away precious, vanishing high skill service jobs for market access to those countries.)
We should treat homeless people based on the way the person acts, and not assume homelessness is the result of personal failings or vices. (Maybe homelessness in Europe is less common than it is here in the US because of the EU's much more generous social programs, which make it so most of those who lose jobs can remain housed for some time. Here, many less skilled and/or less educated, especially single families with young children and older people with health problems, as the US is the worst country in the world to be chronically ill in, are struggling. )
Its unlikely to get any better without a realization that we're all in the same boat when it comes to our future planet. Studies have shown that the "American exceptionalism" of bygone days has largely shifted to Europe (except for immigrants, who do better han native born Americans)
Unfortunately, what that means is that the biggest predictor of social class in the US today is the economic status of one's parents. (the US is now even more socially stratified than the situation in Western Europe used to be.)
Meanwhile, in the EU, the prioritizing of education over the last few decades has led to real gains in social mobility. Many countries, like Germany, pay for their citizens to go to college, and most of Europe has for decades, (since before the creation of the WTO, which cut off the ability of countries to implement it) had public healthcare systems which prioritize high quality health care over profits. (although this may change due to the Services Directive that emerged from the Lisbon Treaty, which creates a plethora of new rights for corporations.)
Globally, it seems the wealthy are putting their wagons in a circle, as it were. Perhaps they see themselves as entitled to lower wages by supply and demand and indeed that is what is predicted by standard economic models. A race to the bottom on wages for the remaining jobs.
However, that's a mistake, because unless we radically change our priorities to fund substantial increases in public education, its quite likely that within many of our lifetimes, eventually we will live in a world where jobs are rare and unemployment is the norm rather than the exception. That will lead to a huge increase in the cost of living as many of the things we take for granted are based on trust which we will lose. That will help nobody
Automation's rise shouldn't lead to elimination of public education as some are suggesting. Instead it should lead to a different approach to both work and learning.
Looking into the future, its clear to me that nobody is likely to get good enough at what they do to have a "guaranteed job" in the work environment of the future, unless they really love it enough to devote a substantially larger amount of effort to it than most people do today.
Additionally, very high levels of stress basically cause so much illness they have the potential to render large portions of the population unfit to work. Because stress hormones are neurotoxic.
Now, imagine if only the people who really wanted to work needed to. This would be good for students because they could move forward far faster.
I think its inevitable that we will live in a welfare state of some kind in the future. What we need to do is create a society that does not exclude most people on the basis of money - when nobody needs to work. That's a recipe for disaster.
The sooner we come to terms with that fact the sooner we can start figuring out how to make that a world we all enjoy living in, one where the future of humanity is bright, instead of a nightmare.
We are going to have to grow up, stop posturing, and start behaving like the citizens of an increasingly linked global community that we are.
Rather than trying to take advantage of one another we need to start figuring out how to deal with these changes positively as they are pretty much unavoidable.
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