Money is a strange and fickle thing. It can be hard to manage at the best of times and it always seems to be going out rather than in. Even people who are good at managing their finances need a little help once in a while and no one likes to think of themselves as living solely for their paycheck. We employ our payroll services companies and our use our payroll deductions tables, we pour over payroll in Canada, medical record scanning services, we do everything we can to understand how and why we get paid and it never seems to be enough. But we rarely stop to think about why money is the way it is and where it might be leading. We stop even less to think about the stranger developments that might occur. That money might become more symbolic or that it might cease to matter altogether. We often regulate these scenarios to the land of fantasy or science fiction but the truth is that money, as it is now, is changing. It’s changing rapidly. And I’m not just talking about payroll services companies and general digital credit. I’m talking about jobs disappearing. I’m talking about the rise of machines and the fall of the necessity of general human labor. Let’s take a step back for a second. Get less dramatic for a second. Let’s start with how the economy actually works.
- The economy as it stands now
Now, it’s hard to know at any given moment where the economy stands and where it be headed in the immediate future. That’s just the nature of money traveling and new industries developing. People popularly call the stage we’re living in late capitalism and for a relatively good reason. In the past century and a half, we’ve seen an explosion of innovation that led to a huge increase in manufacturing jobs. This curve bent explosively upward and then just as suddenly dropped off as the manufacturing jobs weren’t needed anymore. The factories shut down and people adapted, as they always do, by moving to other sectors. Entertainment. Customer service. Human services. Payroll services companies. They found a way and they traveled on that way as far as they could. The rise of the internet changed how money moved as well. It allowed for the growth of the individual business instead of the small business, the rise of the self starter and the group start instead of the traditional monetary loans and pushes that had existed within the banking system before. In this way, money could flow a lot easier from one person to another for direct services. The money, that is, that existed for the use of the people, with much of it being locked in small richer minorities in the wealthier countries.
Money as it could potentially be
The global economy as it is today is an impossibly fast moving and ever changing beast but, if there’s any tenant to take away from it, it’s that manufacturing has changed. It hasn’t gone away, not by any means. It’s just changed methodology, pacing and structure. In the first place, American made manufacturing has moved overseas for good. It’s now the domain of developing countries rather than what we call the developed world of Europe, the United States, Japan, Canada and Russia. This is good for their economies, to a degree, but it leaves holes open in the more northerly countries that have been largely filled by automation. This is actually a very underwritten social fact but it is absolutely true. Automation, especially after the mid aughts financial crash, became one of the only viable and cheap ways to mass produce goods and companies, recognizing this, caught on. They began to automate in earnest and slowly remove the jobs that used to belong to people. This is in mid process now but the end point of this type of automation is called a post scarcity society and it’s closer than you might think. Payroll services companies and other companies aside, what will this mean for the future of labor and capital in the industrial and industrializing world? It’s difficult to say just yet. We will see.