Douglas Rushkoff: Are jobs obsolete?
I am afraid to even ask this, but since when is unemployment really a problem? I understand we all want paychecks -- or at least money. We want food, shelter, clothing, and all the things that money buys us. But do we all really want jobs?
The Economist: Social networkers of the world, unite
In the future, then, rather than a mystified system in which networking and fame lead to wealth only indirectly, the top economies will directly pay people to network and become famous. Economies that fail to institute such systems will naturally decay, collapse, and be digested, much as America's cash economy digested the non-cash economies of its aboriginal peoples, or as the global capitalist economy digested the state-socialist economies of the former communist world. Cash will become identical to social points, which is the ultimate point of the money system anyway.
The persistence of the barter myth is curious. It originally goes back to Adam Smith. Other elements of Smith’s argument have long since been abandoned by mainstream economists—the labor theory of value being only the most famous example. Why in this one case are there so many desperately trying to concoct imaginary times and places where something like this must have happened, despite the overwhelming evidence that it did not?
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