Many suburban yards are large enough to grow plenty of food, and the food you grow yourself can vastly outperform anything you buy in terms of taste because you no longer have to be restricted to eating varieties that travel well.
But back in terms of wealth, owning land still remains important as it makes the above possible.
No need to worry about it in our lifetime.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O_TjBNjc9Bo
Bought cheap stuff from Walmart so middle class manufacturing jobs were sent overseas? Refused to get a STEM education so we're required to import 100,000 engineers ever year? Didn't develop a better immigration plan so now we have 11 million undocumented people, many who will work for far less because life is better here. That'll keep wages down.
Professionals are routinely wrong about predicting economic trends. Random teenage kids from average high schools should not be expected to be better than, say, the Fed chairman in this regard.
But you're not, right?
There isn't an ounce of uncertainty in any of your comments despite the fact that you make several outlandish claims about the future.
"It's always turned out that way in the past" is a poor argument IMO.
The world isn't binary. Disagreeing with you doesn't automatically mean I believe "well, in the past it happened that way so it must continue to happen that way."
My only point is that you should be applying the same litmus test to yourself that you're applying to everyone else. You're balking at the certainty of others seemingly without acknowledging that you're suffering from precisely the same flaw in your communication.
This is what a post-scarcity society in denial looks like.
The reason cities like SF and NYC and London already look like this is because they are the vanguard of the future. If present trends continue a house in rural Kentucky will be as unaffordable relative to average wages as one in SOMA. All that cheap money has to go somewhere, so if labor is deflating it must go into assets.
In-deflation is "deflation of labor and the products of labor, and inflation in assets, consumable resources, and essential services like health care and education." It's been the condition in the USA and to some extent Europe since 2008. It's today's equivalent of stagflation in the 70s, something else economists did not think (at the time) was possible and did not understand. Some are starting to get it, which is why you see some starting to talk about inflation in areas like housing separate from inflation in the rest of the economy. In-deflation is not visible in traditional aggregate inflation indices because deflating manufactured goods and labor are grouped with inflating assets and essential goods/services and the two cancel.
So far this has been driven mostly by outsourcing, not automation. When automation really kicks in with good AI, it's game over. There will be universal basic income or blood in the streets.
The basic dichotomy of industrialization is that the workers of one factory is the customers of another.
I say this as a somewhat-former libertarian, and partly out of libertarian sentiment. The totalitarian state that would have to be put in place to enforce widespread poverty in a post-employment era would be significantly less libertarian than the alternative. I imagine something that looks like a cyberpunk noir horror film with drones and scanners and gates everywhere. Since humans do possess empathy, the (few) rich would have to be surveilled and policed as much as the poor; your wealth would be absolutely conditional upon your support of the system. Ultimately the situation is unsustainable and would collapse and probably lead to something even more totalitarian.