This sounds like it's based on a windshield survey driving on highways through suburban America. I too get sickened by the corporate retail and restaurant monotony littering every corner of our highway-connected national landscape, but that doesn't mean that that's the trend just because it's what we see through our windshields. For example, you suggest there's this big trend toward McDonalds and Walmart. Based on what? BLS data/projections show professional & educational services and health care growing the most as a percentage of jobs in the economy, both looking back 10 years and forward 10 years. Retail and hospitality grew less over the last 10 years as a % of jobs in the economy and are projected to be flat in that regard. So not much showing a trend toward McDonalds and Walmart jobs, as you say.
If those are the figures, I'm not surprised. As we become a more technical society, job increases and new categories will occur in the more technical and professional areas. So too with lower skilled service jobs. As automation increases, job numbers can be expected to decrease. What is more significant, in the context of what we are talking about, are overall numbers, not increases or decreases. If there were 2,000 technicians that could run an MRI machine previously, and now their are 3,000, that is a huge increase. The point is, not all that many, out of 320M people, are going to find a future career as an MRI technician.
For whatever reason, for better or worse, a very large mass of the population now works in relatively low skilled service sector jobs. Many of those would possibly like to write software for Bill Gates, or run the Smithsonian Institution. But unless there is a way to job share with a million or so people, they simply will not. Those that have the skill and determination to rise to the top half (or 30%, or whatever the exact figure) of the work force will, if lucky, do so. That leaves a great many for which, as you have suggested in the figures you have found, there is increasing less need for. It would be nice if everyone could be a chief, and not have any Indians, but I doubt this will come about. What is more likely is increased unemployment, and underemployment, downward pressure on wages and benefits, and a general drag on the economy, as large portions of the work force are effectively marginalized and demand is removed from the economy.
I don't think I said it's the sole reason, but people do buy their stuff, and the businesses wouldn't exist if they didn't.
I agree, but ultimately unless you're talking about something radical, the people are going to have to avoid buying en masse from companies they don't actually want to succeed.
Boycotts and such programs are rarely effective, because it is very difficult to organize millions of people from the ground up. And again we can't rest on the assumption that buying patterns produce the ideal society. Many people either don't have a real choice in what they buy, don't know they have a choice, or don't care; or are swayed by misleading advertising, peer pressure, societal expectations, or the demands and time constraints of working two or more jobs due to low wages; or make poor choices due to educational or psychological factors. Libertarians will ascribe near religious attributes to market functioning, but in reality it is the crudest of tools to consider when contemplating societal goals.
Won't argue with you there, but I don't see how this attempt on your part to be balanced and pragmatic jives with MMT.
I think it is completely in keeping. MMT puts a priority on as full employment as possible, and some sort of income support for those who are unemployed. I agree, and I think an outright income supplement could well be more beneficial in the long run than pushing ever more to the most marginal and trivial occupations.
