In the Long Run We’re All Dead. In the Medium Run, We Have Things to Worry About.

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Perhaps today I will link only to people named Matthew. Here is Matt Yglesias on possible fears about the future:

I understand why people worry about technological unemployment. And I understand why people worry about rising entitlement spending burdens. What I don’t understand is why people worry about them both simultaneously. In the technological unemployment world, we’ll be able to give everyone a 2013 level of consumption goods with a radically diminished workforce, raising the question of what everyone is going to actually do.

….The other worry is the opposite of this one. It’s that in the future a very large share of our population will be elderly nonworkers and a very large share of our workforce will be dedicated to taking care of elderly nonworkers (“skyrocketing health care costs”), and that consequently younger people’s living standards will diminish or stagnate.

Either of those things could happen, but they can’t both happen.

Well, now, I’m not so sure about that. The question is: who will benefit from technological unemployment? Unless public policy changes fairly radically, the answer is: the owners of technology. In other words, the rich.

If technology really does keep improving and putting humans out of work, this means the rich will get ever richer. And in theory, we can tax away that wealth to take care of our entitlement problems. In theory. But I don’t think it’s entirely irrational to be worried that this might not be as easy as it sounds. As you may have noticed, rich people fight like crazed weasels to prevent their wealth from being taxed away. Do we think their political power is somehow going to decline as they become richer and richer?

This cycle can’t go on forever. Eventually the masses will rebel, or the rich will actually get less rich because nobody has any money to keep the economy going. (Robots have no need for houses or fast food restaurants.) Or something. But “eventually” could be a ways away. In the medium-term future, both technological unemployment and rising entitlement burdens could indeed both be serious problems simultaneously.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

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