Like the "education gap" explanations (and its solutions, like "more education is the answer"), this explanation is about the last battle, not the current one.

Like the "education gap" explanations (and its solutions, like "more education is the answer"), this explanation is about the last battle, not the current one. It mentions briefly the role of automation (AKA "technological unemployment"), but that's it. The chief driver of unemployment in the future is going to be labor automation, and that is that. The new battle lines are going to be over "how do we get taxes - _and a culture that supports levying them_ - to the level needed so we can supply a guaranteed income, universal healthcare, and free/low-cost housing to support the mass of permanently unemployed, zero marginal product (ZMP) workers that are going to be created over the next 20-30 years." Countries like Denmark have a real leg up on the US policy-wise here, as they already have some of these things in place along with what appears to be a populace that is fairly supportive of keeping them. When you see someone under 10 from now on, ask yourself "what is the likelihood that this kid will have a job 25 years from now?" The answer is becoming "less likely every day." The world is only going to need so many politicians, managers, programmers, and robot designers. Even the hard-to-automate jobs (as per Autor: http://economics.mit.edu/faculty/dautor/papers http://economics.mit.edu/faculty/dautor/papers) are slowly getting automated,and there won't even be jobs in "food service, cleaning and gardening, health support, child care, personal appearance, security guards, recreation, and miscellaneous services" for them to do. We should be thinking about the current and next battle, not the previous one(s), though that's (sadly) often the pattern when it comes to political economy.