OK, so capitalism is fundamentally about choices. Market players compete to bring products / services to the market that both a) people want to choose, and b) i

OK, so capitalism is fundamentally about choices. Market players compete to bring products / services to the market that both a) people want to choose, and b) is cheap to provide. Because it is not the case that the most desirable service is the most expensive to provide, that allows for competition. Markets "learn" over time, advantages gained by one firm are copied by others requiring constant innovation. The job market is no different, but the second quality, being cheap to provide, means there is going to be a constant degrading in the monetary compensation offered to workers, while the desired benefits those workers are getting is paradoxically going to increase. You can most clearly see this in companies like Uber where compensation gets slashed every year, but there's no truly mass uprising of drivers taking place. You can treat this as a failure of union outreach, that Uber drivers should unionize and demand relief. But it's not like they can't organize. They were perfectly capable of organizing a march at Uber headquarters. No, most Uber drivers choose to keep driving, the arguments that they're being exploited seem a little thin when you realize that Uber drivers could be doing just about anything else to make more money if they were really truly being exploited. Workers in America have unparalleled ability, compared to other countries, to try out other industries and occupations. What I think is happening, is that the information age has brought unmatched and unmeasurable utility to common people, in the form of free services provided by tech companies, to everyone (take a second to let it sink in just how unprecedented this is, historically, for a hugely valuable service, like Google search, to be provided to anybody with a Internet connection) and the job market is simply adjusting to meet the new status quo. Being poor in America isn't nearly as horrible as it used to be. You don't need to expend unreal amounts of effort to increase your station just to have a more-or-less happy life anymore. Homeless people all can get online somehow. And that access provides them with incalculable value. There's a reason that everywhere you go, you see people buried in their smartphones. They're choosing smartphone interaction over everything else they could be doing right now. So the labor market is adjusting to fit. People can choose to be poorer, and are doing that rather than expending extraordinary efforts to climb ladders that have, all of a sudden, become so much harder to climb. Because with these services, being poor isn't nearly as onerous.