> Harvard Business School professor John Deighton, when asked about the future of the industry in 2001, said, “Home-delivered groceries? Never.”
I wonder what the equivalent will be in another ~20 years.
The article ends with "And so economists dusted off Keynes. Countries that enthusiastically followed his advice and used public funds to stimulate demand came out of the recession much better off than those that hesitated. China’s decision in 2008 to inject stimulus spending worth more than 12% of GDP looks smart in retrospect."
The title should really say -- "Keynes was right. Gen Z is screwed because we didn't follow his advice".
But the poor fortunes of Gen Z (in the US) are mostly due to a shift in power to big corporations caused by a systematic dismantling of labor unions and the outsourcing of manufacturing to China. Technology is an enabler but not the central culprit.
This sounds very familiar: "Marx argued that, in accordance with the labour theory of value, capitalist competition would necessitate the gradual replacement of workers with machines, allowing an increase in productivity, but with less overall value for each product produced, as more products can be made in a given amount of time, meaning that economic output would increase, but real wages would stay stable, because the input of human labour stays the same".
