Chapter 76 Chapter 14: Twenty Years of Crisis

The other day, I was asked what I thought of American competitiveness.I replied that the question was not at all on my mind.We at National Cash Register Corporation (NCR) only see ourselves as a company that competes internationally, but it just happens to be headquartered in the United States. —Jonathan Schell (NY Newsday, 1993) Particularly poignant, one of the consequences (of mass unemployment) may be the growing alienation of young people from the rest of society.According to contemporary surveys, young people still want to work, no matter how hard it is to find them; they still want to build meaningful careers.More broadly speaking, if the society in the next ten years is not only a world where "us" and "them" are drifting apart (the difference between others and me roughly represents the difference between capital and labor), but also A world in which the majority itself is increasingly divided.That is to say, among the working population, there is a great disparity between the younger and less secure group and the more experienced and more secure group.In such a society, there must be some kind of danger in it.

Investin, secretary-general of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (Investing 1983, p. 15)