The article has a somber tone, lamenting the holes that have opened up in our societies and economies since the heyday of industrial production. It mentions bu

The article has a somber tone, lamenting the holes that have opened up in our societies and economies since the heyday of industrial production. It mentions but does not expand on the central social problem with industrial production: a small group of people can produce enough product for the whole world. And this problem becomes more acute, the more advanced industry becomes. (There are other problems with industrial production such as environmental destruction and resource depletion, but these problems seem to be more widely diagnosed and understood.) We have not yet solved the problem that industrial production is too efficient. I use the word "solved" as I consider the economic system from a humanistic perspective. Much like wealth concentration can reduce the flow of money and disincentivize commerce, the concentration of production can do the same. I think it's an error that efficiency is the only outcome that needs to be optimized, an error often accompanied by facile arguments about comparative advantage, freeing people to do more productive work, and infinite demand. Post-industrial society is, in my opinion, the result of these arguments failing in the real world. I think the next stage of economic development is a recognition that efficiency must be weighed against redundancy. (As well as conservation, but again this is more widely recognized.) This wouldn't be a return to pre-industrial society, where redundancy was a necessary background given the limits of transportation and communication. Rather it would require a new mindset that sacrifices efficiency for redundancy in a deliberate tradeoff.