How Can a Society Achieve Almost Full Employment in a capitalist System ?

This is a wonderful thought provoking post @Yamantau . It gives me faith that Mumsnet isn’t just a den of folk wanting to tear strips out of each other or bring up perceived slights about holidays or inheritances.

Back on topic -

I think this is a problem governments in the Global North are going to have to start tackling head on, instead of kicking the can down the road as is their usual way.

We can’t have full employment with the current or near-future economy. This is really going to start to bite with the people who went to university in the 2000s who believe they are entitled to a career that gives them the housing that is as good as, or better, than their parents who left school at 16 or 18 and bought houses at 2.5 x their salary, or could do it on one income in the household.

No generation ever wants to be worse off than those that came before. The way we tend to look past this problem in the UK is through rising house prices granting inheritances to middle class families. It makes them the “shareholding group”, a voter base which all parties pander to as a route to secure power, but end up shoring up their interests every time due to the above.

What we can have however is an honest look at what the UK actually needs from 2030 onwards. It isn’t inexorably rising house prices. It isn’t a lack of acknowledgement about falling incomes, rising costs of childcare, the elimination of entire white collar job sectors.

Universal basic income is coming, but the very idea of it will be torn apart ideologically by those who were keen to blame the furloughed for something they never asked for.

It will be a race to the bottom, and I’m going to wince when I see it.

They put us on UBI - and we lose the last remnants of political leverage we had.