What I put together circa 2010 is becoming more and more relevant: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpdfernhout.net%2Fbeyond-... "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
Tangentially, since you mentioned coal, coal plants are discussed there as an example of the complex dynamics of technological and social change both creating and destroying jobs given externalities -- including from the laissez-faire capitalist economic imperative to privatize gains while socializing risks and costs :
"Also, many current industries that employ large numbers of people (ranging from the health insurance industry, the compulsory schooling industry, the defense industry, the fossil fuel industry, conventional agriculture industry, the software industry, the newspaper and media industries, and some consumer products industries) are coming under pressure from various movements from both the left and the right of the political spectrum in ways that might reduce the need for much paid work in various ways. Such changes might either directly eliminate jobs or, by increasing jobs temporarily eliminate subsequent problems in other areas and the jobs that go with them (as reflected in projections of overall cost savings by such transitions); for example building new wind farms instead of new coal plants might reduce medical expenses from asthma or from mercury poisoning. A single-payer health care movement, a homeschooling and alternative education movement, a global peace movement, a renewable energy movement, an organic agriculture movement, a free software movement, a peer-to-peer movement, a small government movement, an environmental movement, and a voluntary simplicity movement, taken together as a global mindshift of the collective imagination, have the potential to eliminate the need for many millions of paid jobs in the USA while providing enormous direct and indirect cost savings. This would make the unemployment situation much worse than it currently is, while paradoxically possibly improving our society and lowering taxes. Many of the current justifications for continuing social policies that may have problematical effects on the health of society, pose global security risks, or may waste prosperity in various ways is that they create vast numbers of paid jobs as a form of make-work. ...
Increasing mental health issues like depression and autism, and increasing physical health issues like obesity and diabetes and cancer, all possibly linked to poor nutrition, stress, lack of exercise, lack of sunlight and other factors in an industrialized USA (including industrial pollution), have meant many new jobs have been created in the health care field. So, for example, coal plants don't just create jobs for coal miners, construction workers, and plant operators, they also create jobs for doctors treating the results of low-level mercury pollution poisoning people and from smog cutting down sunlight. Television not only creates jobs for media producers, but also for health care workers to treat obesity resulting from sedentary watching behavior (including not enough sunlight and vitamin D) or purchasing unhealthy products that are advertised. ...
Macroeconomics as a mathematical discipline generally ignores the issue of precisely how physical resources are interchangeable. Before this shift in economic thinking to a more resource-based view, that question of "how" things are transformed had generally been left to other disciplines like engineering or industrial chemistry (the actual physical alchemists of our age). For one thinking in terms of resources and ecology, the question of how nutrients cycle from farm to human to sewage and then back to farm as fertilizer might be as relevant as discussing the pricing of each of those items, like biologist John Todd explores as a form of ecological economics as it relates to mainstream business opportunities. People like Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and Hunter Lovins have written related books on the idea of natural capital. For another example, the question of exactly how coal-fired power plants might connect to human health and other natural capital was previously left to the health profession or the engineering profession before this transdisciplinary shift where economists, engineers, ecologists, health professionals, and people with other interests might all work together to understand the interactions. In the process of thinking through the interactions, considerations about creating healthy and enjoyable jobs can be included in the analysis of costs and benefits to various parties including various things that are often ignored as externalities. So, a simple analysis [in the past] might indicate coal was cheaper than solar power, but a more complete analysis, like attempted in the book Brittle Power might indicate the value in shifting economic resources to the green energy sector as ultimately cheaper when all resource costs, human costs, and other opportunities are considered. These sorts of analyses have long happened informally through the political process such as with recent US political decisions moving towards a ban of new coal-fired power plants. Jane Jacobs, in her writings on the economies of cities, is one example of trying to think through the details of how specific ventures in a city affects the overall structure of that city's economy, including the creation of desirable local jobs through import replacement. A big issue of resource-based economics is to formalize this decision making process somehow, where the issue of creating good jobs locally would be weighed as one factor among many. ..."
