Yeah; a cursory look at salaries suggests the article is misdiagnosing. Most people work in jobs they don't want to do. That is why they are paid in the first p

Yeah; a cursory look at salaries suggests the article is misdiagnosing. Most people work in jobs they don't want to do. That is why they are paid in the first place. I'm sure there are shelf stackers in the supermarket where shelf stacking is their ideal job and maybe one day I will meet one. But most would be just as happy to work in a factory instead. The problem is that making factories effective in the US is probably illegal or opposed by the government. China did it by: - Low salaries and not being fussy about conditions (broadly illegal in the US - minimum wage & a relatively heavy union presence). Note that it turns out salaries and conditions for the Chinese started improving rapidly regardless. - Lots of new coal plants, transitioning to big build outs of renewables, nuclear & other investments looking for cheap options guided by what they can install in large quantities. Don't try that in the west; the government has historically been extremely hostile to 2/3 of that. Not sure what the environmental assessment situation is like for renewables in practice observe that Texas is the big US generator and I'd bet there is a regulatory link. - Building lots of things like infrastructure. Appears to be legally difficult in the West as a whole otherwise more people would be doing it. The environmental and community impacts are not tolerated. - Allowing factories to run even when the smog darkens the sky. Running the literal factories in the US would probably not be tolerated. And the political support for all those policies is still there. None of them are going away any time soon. These are trade offs that make it hard to support an industrial society. We don't know how to run an industrial society without producing industrial amounts of waste. Nobody seems to know.