One reason is changing geopolitics. USA is not the sole superpower that it was in the 60s. Other countries are also doing a lot better now. A lot of the jobs in manufacturing have been outsourced to China, in service industry to India. This has led to shift of wealth from US to these countries. The days of American exceptionalism are probably ending. It's only going to get tougher from here.
easy to blame this, but all productivity gains in the US for 40 years have gone to the top; the reason is that our labor market has been undercut by immigration (legitimate and illegitimate) and globalized supply chains. workers do not have the ability to extract higher wages because of a concerted international project to make the labor market as liquid as possible and arbitrage populations with lower standards of living against them. this has been a huge boon to the owners and financiers of industry (and parts of the developing world) at the expense of normal americans. this is the trade our masters have made on our behalf, beginning as a solution to the economic crisis of the 1970s, and as a dead woman once said, "there is no alternative".
What you are seeing is perpetuation of both the rich staying rich and those who were able to capitalize from the technologies invented between 1940 to now. The same could be said in the US at the turn of the last century (1900). The advances that will happen now will be largely thanks to Machine Learning and Quantum computing as our understanding of Quantum Level Physics grows.
This is also a fair point as the USA after WW2 was the only first world nation with an untouched industrial base (that was recently upgraded thanks to the tax payers). That gave the USA an insurmountable advantage as the rest of the world rebuilt.
People in the 60s were afraid of nuclear war with the other superpower, USSR. In the 80s job were outsourced to the Japan superpower. USA has never been alone up there. Maybe in the 90s.
The reality is that we need to think about how a population of people will survive when it's more efficient and easier to mechanize a job.
We saw it during the pandemic as we see more of it now. They're finding ways of mechanizing agriculture to make more food with less labor input. They are finding ways of improving health by improving the cognition of machines to find black and white problems within the data deluge. They're even finding ways of making burger flippers and package delivery people obsolete by building machines to do the tasks.
Because when you push a business to try to solve labor problems, they will look for ways of growth that may not include people in general.
That has nothing to do with nationalistic ideals but with simple Capitalism. If you legislate the requirement of it, then what changes how we evolve?
It seems immoral to force people to do something they may not want to do at the same time people will complain that the value of one person shouldn't be held to be lower than another.
Basic income so far has been showing the best way to address this issue - and we've all seen a form of it during the pandemic. What needs to happen is to get society as a whole to make it permanent.
