Thanks for the really interesting reply! I think this question of unemployment and underemployment is one that's simply going to get worse everywhere, and I do

Thanks for the really interesting reply! I think this question of unemployment and underemployment is one that's simply going to get worse everywhere, and I don't see a non-political solution. I just don't see a realistic way to employ everybody, or even a majority, in a high automation society. So my feeling is, the countries that will be best placed to tackle this are the ones that are able to push forward a political solution. I'm not entirely sure of how socialist china is, but there are certainly some socialists in the CCP who would be perfectly happy for everybody to be unemployed or underemployed, and to pay for them from the profits of highly automated industry. I think it's probably a question of ideological flexibility. Because China is both officially marxist, practically capitalist, traditionally confucian, and pragmatically developmentalist, they have a lot of options open when it comes to political solutions that western countries don't. So they could, for instance, just pay everybody UBI, then point out that China is a socialist country if elites object. That would be a harder argument in officially capitalist countries. I don't imagine they'll go that way, but I guess the basic point for me is that productivity, employment, and welfare are largely the result of political decisions. You can run the economy like they did in the DDR, where everybody had a job even if it was totally meaningless. You can run the economy like in Japan, where if you have a job, you'll probably never lose it. These things have different tradeoffs. The biggest challenges are usually how hardened the political discourse is around work itself.