Scarcity of resource
Doesn't this all just come down to globalization and ease of resource mobility?
Technology means you need less people, and in many industries also means you need less skilled people, which means it is easier to move around the world to places with cheaper labour costs (over time these places skill up, and get more expensive, so it moves elsewhere). Modern cargo ships effectively make transport free except for the in-country part to and from the dock (which you would have to pay anyway shipping local goods around the country), so there is little penalty to globalization unless there are border tariffs.
The end result is a massive oversupply of blue collar workers, which is only really offset by the fact that we have enough income in the rest of economy to fund a lot of services jobs which can mop up people (restaurant staff, coffee shop baristas, next day delivery drivers for Amazon, call centers for your iThingy tech support). The major downside is that most of these services are "luxuries" and so as soon as globalization catches up and a chunk of the "middle class" white collar jobs start to move overseas then the whole pyramid collapses, because services industry based economies are reliant on someone at the top of the pyramid pushing money in to it so the guys at the bottom get paid (vs. just having something in the ground to dig out and put on your market barrow - vegetable or mineral).
I think boom really came from three things:
* Post-war work ethic - people wanted to put the country back together again.
* Integration of technology - drives productivity
* Exploitation of world resources - the industrial societies dug up a lot of resources elsewhere in the world which makes them cheap. Since China started hoovering up more and more of them, physical resource costs have gone up somewhat, making goods more expensive.
I think the basic question here is "how does a western services-based capitalist society survive in a situation with a global oversupply of labour and improving skill sets up in Asia and Africa?" Personally I think the answer is "it can't", at least not at the current standard of living everyone expects, and at that point I think it stops being about economics and starts being about religion ^H politics - because you can't have 75% of the populus being "poor" - that is the thing that revolutions are made of.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
