ABSTRACT
The argument of this chapter is very simple. It is that the steadily deflationary character of the money created by job markets, together with the extraordinarily high productivity that will characterize the early years of nearly all job-market economies, will lead in most cultures to the transformation of their economies into a new state. This new state will be characterized both by the intermittency of work—that is, the intervals of paidwork in a typical worker’s life will be separated by more and more frequent intervals of ownwork and/or leisure—and by a grand expansion of the average amount of leisure enjoyed by all workers. Experience with these two likely developments will, in turn, lead to strong motives in ordinary people to increase the rates at which they save from current income. This will have the effect of moving the center of gravity of investable, financial wealth away from the ranks of the nonworking wealthy, where it is now firmly lodged in capitalist societies, toward ordinary workers. Ordinary people will thus acquire a much larger voice than they presently have in how saved money—which will then largely be their money—is to be spent. Their use of that voice in democratic processes is very likely to lead, in nearly all societies served by job markets, to what might be called the “socialization of investment.”
