Tham khảo tài liệu 'technology and the economy of the future_5', kinh tế - quản lý, kinh tế học phục vụ nhu cầu học tập, nghiên cứu và làm việc hiệu quả | Danger 153 implement policies to address the situation. The natural incentives in the private sector would tend to accelerate rather than resolve the crisis. There is an ongoing trend toward concentration of income that is driven largely by the continuing advance of automation technology and globalization and also by a lack of progressive tax policies. Many people might argue that increasing income inequality is caused primarily by a skill premium. In other words in the modern technological economy people who are highly educated and skilled have a significant advantage in the labor force. While this has been true so far it is largely because relatively low skill jobs have been the first to be automated and also the first to be subjected to the full force of globalization. As we saw in Chapter 2 advancing automation technology will increasingly threaten highly paid knowledge workers with college educations. These jobs will also of course be subject to offshoring. Clear evidence of these trends is already apparent in information technology IT jobs and we can expect this to become much more broad- based in the future. We can expect that income will become even more concentrated in the hands of those who are positioned to benefit directly from the increasing value of technological capital relative to labor. Extreme income inequality is generally presented as a social problem or an issue of basic fairness. While it may be these things it is also more critically a mathematical problem in terms of the viability of the mass market. When purchasing power is taken from thousands of average consumers and concentrated in the hands of one weal Copyrighted Material Paperback Kindle available @ Amazon THE LIGHTS IN THE TUNNEL 154 thy individual that purchasing power is effectively sterilized it no longer plays a vibrant role in generating mass market demand for products and services. As we have seen this will ultimately cause the market river to run dry. We often hear that income
