An Age Where Two People Can Feed Twenty, So Why Are We More Anxious Than Ever?

 

An Age Where Two People Can Feed Twenty,

So Why Are We More Anxious Than Ever?

“In the past, ten people had to work so that twenty people could live.
Now, thanks to advanced technology, even if just two people work, twenty can live.”

On the surface, this sounds like a complete utopia.
We are surrounded by an abundance of goods, and thanks to automation, AI, and smart factories, human labor is decreasing.
Yet reality looks almost the opposite.

• Precarious work, temp jobs, part-time gigs, and platform labor are more common than stable full-time jobs.

• “Labor flexibility”—the idea that you can be laid off at any time—has become a daily keyword.

• On paper, GDP and productivity are rising, but people keep saying their quality of life doesn’t feel much better.

Surprisingly, there was someone who more or less foresaw this situation:
Albert Einstein. We know him as an icon of physics, but he also left behind some sharp observations on economics.

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1. The Dilemma of Capitalism as Seen by Einstein

Around the time of the Great Depression in the 1930s, Einstein wrote pieces like
“Thoughts on the World Economic Crisis” and “Why Socialism?”,
where he pointed out structural contradictions in capitalism. (Monthly Review)

His core concern is unexpectedly simple:

1. As technology advances, the amount of labor actually needed keeps decreasing.

2. But in a laissez-faire market, reduced labor demand appears as unemployment.

3. If unemployment grows, purchasing power shrinks → goods don’t sell → firms fail → even more unemployment.

In other words, we repeatedly end up in the paradoxical situation where:

“We have more than enough capacity to produce what is needed,
yet the wallets of those who might buy it are empty.”

Einstein also played with the term “overproduction.”

• Just because warehouses are full of goods does not mean
  human needs have truly been met.

• The issue is not that there are “too many goods,” but that
  people lack the wages and income to buy those goods. (Grademiners.com)

So he took a bold step and began to think about:

• A planned economy and

• Social coordination of working hours and wages.

Of course, the socialist model he imagined never took shape exactly as he envisioned,
and real-world socialist states collapsed under other kinds of problems.
Still, his basic critique remains striking:

Instead of “technological progress → shorter working hours and better lives,”
we get “technological progress → unemployment, insecurity, and polarization.”

That structural direction of travel is exactly what he warned about.

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2. The First Wave of Globalization, 1870–1914: A Game We Already Watched Collapse

Today we talk as if “globalization” were the spirit of the age,
but in fact the globalization we’re living through now is not humanity’s first experiment.

Economic historians call the period from about 1870 to 1914
the era of “First Globalization.” (Wikipedia)

Back then, the world looked strangely familiar:

• Railways, steamships, and the telegraph sharply lowered the cost of transport and communication.

• European capital flowed around the world, building railways, plantations, and mines in colonies and emerging regions.

• The gold standard and free trade combined to create a vast network of trade and finance.

In today’s language, it was “a 19th-century version of global supply chains plus financial globalization.”

But that system was rocked by two massive shocks:

1. World War I (1914) – arms races and imperial rivalries exploded into war.

2. The Great Depression (1929) – followed by protectionism, financial collapse, and mass unemployment.

As a result, the first globalization ended in the upheavals of the 20th century:

• Some countries tried to survive through reformed capitalism, welfare states, and New Deal–style policies.

• Some raced toward fascism and militarism.

• Others opted for Soviet-style planned economies.

As the original DC post puts it, this shows that capitalism is not some
“gentle system that has never gone through crisis,” but rather:

“Version 1.0 of globalization already blew up once and had to be rebuilt from the ground up.”

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3. Second/Third Globalization and Neoliberalism:

If the Economy Is Growing, Why Isn’t My Paycheck?

The era we live in now is often described as one of
“neoliberal globalization.”

From the 1970s and 80s onward, we see a push for: (Wikipedia)

• Deregulation

• Privatization

• Fiscal austerity

• Labor market flexibility

• Free movement of capital and goods

The stated goal is always roughly the same:

“Free up markets, remove regulations, maximize efficiency and growth.”

And indeed:

• World GDP has risen substantially.

• Many emerging economies have successfully industrialized.

• Global corporations have seen explosive gains in productivity.

Yet what many people actually feel is closer to this:

• Stable full-time jobs are declining, while non-regular work, temp jobs, and platform gigs are on the rise.

• Companies are doing well, but my own wages and sense of security are stagnant—or even declining.

• Workers feel like “easily replaceable labor,” with weaker bargaining power.

Why?

In very simplified form, the picture looks like this:

1. Thanks to technology and automation, we now have the capacity for “two people to feed twenty.”

2. From the perspective of capital, there is no reason to employ all twenty.

3. The remaining eighteen are pushed into precarious, low-wage sectors—non-regular, platform, or service work.

4. Productivity soars, but labor’s share of total income shrinks,
   and income and wealth concentrate at the top.

Many studies argue that when neoliberal policies, financialization, and automation are combined,
inequality and precarious labor tend to intensify together. (People UMass)

In this sense, the scenario Einstein feared—
“technology reduces the need for labor, but the fruits of that progress do not reach everyone”—
has taken on a more complex, updated form in our time.

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4. If There Is Enough Food, Why Do Hundreds of Millions Still Go Hungry?

One especially striking part of the original DC post was this:

“In some places, surplus food is dumped into the ocean,
while in others, tens of millions starve to death.”

The phrasing is extreme, but the core concern is quite realistic.

• The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that
  about one-third of all food produced globally is lost or wasted. (FAOHome)

• At the same time, as of 2024,
  about 673 million people (over 8% of the world’s population) suffer from hunger,
  and more than 2 billion people cannot afford a stable “healthy diet.” (FAOHome)

So the problem is not:

• That we lack the capacity to produce food, but that

• Because of prices, incomes, debt, conflict, infrastructure, and policy failures,
  people cannot access that food. (AP News)

This lines up exactly with Einstein’s argument:

“Humanity has the capacity to produce enough goods to sustain everyone,
but because of market structures and income distribution,
countless people cannot reach those goods.”

Between our productive capacity and human lives,
a massive “wall of distribution” has been erected.

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5. The Age of Labor Flexibility and “Bullshit Jobs”

The original post makes another intriguing point:

“The amount of necessary labor declines,
but because we can’t just let people sit idle,
we create unnecessary ‘bullshit jobs’ to burn off the surplus productive power—
the former is communistic, the latter fascistic.”

Put more gently, it means this:

1. Thanks to technology, the amount of essential labor has decreased,
   but people’s income is still tied to “having a job.”

2. So society can either move toward
   “Let’s all work less and share life more” (shorter working hours, stronger welfare, etc.),

3. Or it can move toward
   “Let’s create jobs, even pointless ones, to keep people busy”
   (military buildup, bloated bureaucracy, purely formal tasks, and so on).

British anthropologist David Graeber used the term
“bullshit jobs” to describe such roles—jobs that persist structurally,
even though it is hard to articulate why they are really needed.

Of course, we cannot simply declare soldiers, civil servants, or managers “useless” across the board.
But:

• There clearly are organizations that have grown big not because of real social need,
  but because of politics, ideology, or power maintenance.

• There are also inefficiencies that remain because of vested interests,
  even though technology could automate or streamline them.

Meanwhile, critical areas like care work, education, environmental protection, and public health
struggle with staff shortages,
while other areas are overloaded with work that looks a lot like “making reports and staying in line.”

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6. So Where Can We Go From Here?

At this point, the important move is not to shout “Let’s overthrow capitalism right now,”
but to calmly examine the debates that are already underway.

Some of the key discussions in real-world politics and policy include:

1. Shorter working hours and work-sharing

   • Four-day workweeks, strict limits on overtime, expansion of part-time options, etc.

   • Sharing the same total volume of work among more people.

2. Stronger minimum wages and income floors

   • This connects directly with Einstein’s intuition that
     “we must secure a minimum level of purchasing power to avoid repeated crises.” (Grademiners.com)

3. Basic income and social allowances

   • Ideas to redistribute part of the gains from automation directly to citizens.

   • The debate is intense, but the goal is to loosen the tight linkage between “labor = right to exist.”

4. Expansion of public services and public goods

   • Moving basic domains like education, healthcare, housing, and transport
     closer to “social rights” and further from pure “market-priced commodities.”

5. A recalibration of globalization

   • Shifting away from totally unregulated, fully open markets toward
     new rules that include environmental and labor standards.

   • Stronger regulations on excessive financialization and tax avoidance by multinational capital.

What counts as the “right answer” will vary by political position.
But one thing seems clear:

We live in an era where the old formula
“as long as we grow, everyone will naturally prosper”
no longer works automatically.

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7. Conclusion – Technology, Capitalism, and a Life Worth Living

Let’s return to where we started:

• We have technologies advanced enough that two people can support twenty,

• Yet we live in a society where those twenty include eighteen people
  struggling with precarious work, unemployment, or low wages.

Almost a century ago, Einstein anticipated this kind of situation and argued that,
while preserving the advantages of capitalism (creativity, efficiency),
we should think seriously about how to ensure that:

“The fruits of technological progress are shared by everyone.” (Monthly Review)

Today, we face that question again, now entangled with:

• The first, second, and third waves of globalization,

• The achievements and side effects of neoliberalism,

• Automation, AI, and the platform economy,

• And the contradictions of food, environment, and inequality.

The proposal of this piece is simple:

As technology increasingly frees us from necessary labor,
we can no longer avoid the question of
how to reconnect labor, income, and a life worth living.

In the next installment, we’ll look at historical attempts to answer that question:

• Fordism,

• The welfare state,

• The 40-hour workweek,

• And more recent debates over basic income and the four-day workweek—

all in one sweep.

If we want to move from a society obsessed with “producing more”
to one focused on “living more humanely,”
what exactly needs to be redesigned?

That question will be a useful starting point
for the humanities, political, and economic discussions to come.