Powerful Economic Forces that Nobody Knows How to Stop

Paul Krugman used those words to describe the plight of rural America, and other parts of the world with similar problems.  It's not just rural America, though, it's in the cities too.  In rural America it's the continuing advance of mechanization that's making farming, the occupation that formerly employed most of the human race, a job that can be done by a few.  This trend has been going on for over a century, but in the middle of the twentieth century factory jobs replaced the farming jobs with better paying ones, but now those factory jobs are largely gone too.

The powerful and uncontrollable economic forces are crushing much of the newly created global middle class.  In my opinion, it can only get worse, as both unskilled and skilled jobs go increasingly to automation and robots.

Right now the US is continuing to see a flurry of job creation, but there is little sign that many of these jobs will be high quality or good paying ones.  For many workers, or at least for their jobs, the future looks like that of the horse 110 years ago.