Everyone does deserve to participate and contribute and have that be recognized and remunerated. 1/

But no magic insists, and it will be increasingly hard for policy to engineer, a wage setting process that results in (1) a large enough share of the economy going to wages and (2) a sufficiently compressed distribution of those wages to form the basis of a decent society. 2/

In particular, high-bargaining-power work is increasingly automated, there will always be jobs for people, but much of it may be care work and provision of discretionary services, neither of which imbue workers with bargaining power or command high wages. 3/

One way or another, we will have to find means to give the broad public shares of the production endowed by all that automation, that is of property income. 4/

That doesn’t have to be structured in a way that feels like government charity for losers. But it will have to happen, if we don’t want to live in an Elysium-style stratified society. /fin