WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Job Creation In A Post-Blue World.

There are several problems with an approach that envisions steady long term growth in the numbers of people dependent on government services and transfer programs to keep them afloat, but the crucial problem for the redistribute-to-perserve approach may be practical, not theoretical or moral.

Increasingly, it looks to me as if large chunks of the upper middle class are about to get whacked. Many of the learned professions are going to see their incomes cut and the private sector is going to seek much greater productivity improvements by replacing expensive US-based executives with cheaper foreign ones — and even cheaper computer technology. Lawyers, accountants, business managers and executives, university professors and administrators, architects, designers, upper level civil servants, NGO managers: this means you.

What’s happening is that computers and software are reaching the point where they can effectively displace more and more routine skilled labor — just as for the last forty years we’ve seen automation reducing the need for routine human labor in factories. At the same time the cost structure of the learned professions is so high that current patterns are increasingly unsustainable.

Yep.