JOBS JOBS JOBS: Avoiding an information-age welfare state.

This is Blade Runner softened by food stamps, but as in the public housing projects and other warehouses where we store “surplus” people today, the most acute form of poverty and deprivation will not be the lack of food, clothing or even shelter. It will be a lack of social connection, of independence founded on achievement, on the human dignity that comes from doing work. Bellies will be full, but lives will be empty, and with that emptiness will come ills of every kind: addiction, brutality, ugly, and stunted sexual and emotional lives for many, neglect of the young and the old.

Depressing. But this first part of Mead's post is, I would argue, the end result of our liberal political class's policies. Mead, in his second part, argues for a more optimistic future, but I still regard even the optimistic half as somewhat depressing.