With an increase in immigration and a cheapening of robotic workers and kiosks... where is this decrease in unemployment and increase in labor-force participation going to come from?
I mean, there is "always" going to be jobs for plumbers and spots for artisan made stuff... but those jobs aren't going to replace the amount of jobs that will be lost when $15 becomes more expensive than iRobot...
> With an increase in immigration and a cheapening of robotic workers and kiosks... where is this decrease in unemployment and increase in labor-force participation going to come from?
I don't know where it would come from (perhaps the same magical unicorn tooth fairy who would remove balkanization, inspire durable construction, and give us more passenger rail), but the US would look a lot stronger if it had it.
This includes politically stronger; poverty, disengagement from the labor force, and high inequality are not good for a country's political stability.
Not fast enough to replace the abolished ones, and most of those new jobs are knowledge work, which can't scale as there's a IQ floor that will stop most people from being able to work them. The more we shift to knowledge work, the higher unemployment will climb. You're making the mistake of thinking the past predicts the future, but today's automation is unprecedented, it will not follow the same pattern because it has different effects.
Humans have a knack for selfishness and war, it's more likely there will be much needless suffering and death along any path to an eventual solution to those problems, which will likely be a solution that most suffer under.
A UBI, supplied taxafion, and significant deregulation would enable citizens to participate in the economy on much more liberal terms and you would almost always see participation rates rise while total hours worked fall.
Passenger rail; durable houses; less unemployment and more labor-force participation; a population not balkanized along political/cultural lines.