I was chatting with a friend who owns an auto repair shop the on a recent Friday afternoon when a customer came in to pick up a car.

“Don’t say a word about politics or Trump in front of this guy”, my friend warned. …

But there is a bright side…

The collapse of the industrial economy in 2008 followed by the COVID recession wiped out a substantial portion of the wealth of the younger Boomer cohort. These people, now in their fifties and early sixties, will likely never retire. Their golden years will be a scramble to avoid poverty.

Gallup…

Recovery? No so fast!

We are already hearing about economic and social “recovery” and we’ll probably keep on hearing about it until we settle into a comfortable routine.

But the economy will never “recover”. Not really. Things will change into something new, but they will never return to what they were pre-C19.

Entire sectors…

Customer facing jobs in retail, hospitality and food service will likely not return, at least nowhere near the levels they were before the COVID-19 crisis. The labor market is going to look very different in the future than it has in the past.

Before the shutdowns robots were already displacing…

The new challenge is Downward Nobility.

Back in the 1990’s there was a lot of talk about shifting from an industrial economy to a service economy. Sometimes you would also hear of an emerging knowledge economy.

It was clear that the industrial economy that had created so much wealth was on its deathbed, but few people…

The media is in a dither about the COVID vaccine. There are tons of stories about when the vaccine will arrive, who will be the first to receive it and how soon everything will return to normal.

It’s being presented like a golden bullet that will take the world back…

We’ve all been feeling it. The world is on the verge of dramatic change.

It’ s not just a new Democratic president or the COVID pandemic and lockdowns. It’s a sense that 2021 will be unlike anything in the past. Instead of the gradual change that history usually takes there seems to be a sense of an imminent break with the past.

A new world will emerge and mature in the coming decade.

It’s hard…

The 2008 Great Recession was really the last gasp of the industrial revolution.

Scholars and Artificial Intelligence researchers talk about new iterations of the Industrial Revolution — IR 3 and IR4 — but those advances in cyber technology will never create jobs for millions of people descended from hard-working laborers who spent their working lives on assembly lines, steel and lumber mills and…