I'll accept increasing amounts of automation and efficiency as a reason for the reduced number of open positions but the idea that this generation is somehow more lazy than any other is ludicrous.
And finally the idea of "contributing to society" is so nebulous I don't know where to begin. Is someone who makes a really good latte contributing to society? Is an investment banker contributing? Kim Kardashian? Zynga?
The way we have defined it in an open capitalistic market is that if someone is willing to pay you money, you are providing value!
(Societal value is obviously slightly different, since people will pay for things like hitmen, who are obviously providing value to one party but taking away a near infinite amount of value from another.)
And yes it is sort of a circular definition.
> Who said anything about corporations? Hiring people to do work has been a basic part of the human experience for thousands of years. Unless you can run your entire business on your own you're going to need help, and so you give someone else money to do what you can't.
So what we need is a certain % of people who are willing to be entrepreneurs, thereby keeping others employed.
Thus one has to ask:
• Are entrepreneurs being provided with enough incentive and possibilities to open their businesses?
• Has something changed from a societal perspective that has decreased the percentage of people who have an entrepreneurial mindset?
Obviously the first the government (and private industry) can help solve, but the second, well, that is a bit harder of a problem!
Before there were massive corporations employing everyone, people typically did work for themselves in some way shape or form.
Heck go to other countries, look at how many street vendors there are, people going door to door selling food, trinkets, hand made creations.
Why is our attitude that "some giant corporation should hire me to work 9-5"?
Why should that happen? Just because, by some economic anomaly, that is how it worked for 60 or 70 years?
Corporations are very inefficient, but less so now than in times past.
We all have heard stories of a secretary whose sole job was to take mailed in checks, open the envelope, take the check out, and type it into a computer, or copy it down onto some form.
Or even worse, employees whose job was to take items coming in on one computer screen and copy them to another computer screen.
Even more antiquated, the guy pulling the same lever in the factory every 5 seconds.
And we have all heard stories (or encountered first hand) corporate employees whose sole job was to go to meetings and discuss things and then write papers that got read by no one and ignored. (A lot of these types exist around the IT sectors in large companies, writing "strategy" papers on integrating some piece of software that consist of Power Point slides that have little to no meaning.)
Those are all examples of waste. Those jobs are gone, because they should be gone. They contributed nothing to society except to fill a void that existed solely because of inefficiencies in how large companies were run.
So now the people who would have filled those jobs need to find something that actually contributes to society.
That is sort of what money is supposed represent after all, how much value someone has provided through goods or service.