One of the is subjects that I follow is artificial intelligence, robotics and automation.
From an economic standpoint, these technologies are expected to replace over half the jobs in the current economy in the next 10-30 years.
The usual response is that new types of jobs will rise to replace the older jobs. This is based on the fallacy that history will repeat itself. In other words, that new tech has always created new jobs as it has destroyed them.
This is a flawed assumption. The prior tech revolutions may have eliminated the need for some types of labor to increase productivity, but it has always required humans to operate it.
The automaton revolution is intended to replace both physical labor and the creative intelligence that goes into decision making. The question becomes - what's left for humans to do if automaton replaces all of the inputs, including decision making, that humans once offered?
We have never faced this in human history- that we are essentially cutting ourselves completely out of equation. What area then could we create new jobs? One place may be those areas where one offs are important, but the vast bulk of human employment, even at the highest managerial and professional levels, are actually routinized decision making. For example, a vast bulk of the jobs in the financial services industry can likely be automated. So can journalism. As can the vast bulk of legal decisions with a sufficiently advanced AI. We are nearing that point.
There is no economic theory that is exactly designed to address the end of human labor as we have known it since the industrial revolution. Even Marx presumed the exploitation of labor, rather than making such labor unnecessary to the economy. The right wing arguments of neoclassical capitalism and Neoliberalism offer even less insight.
It is, therefore, by outcome rather theory that I think left wing policies are more likely to help in the economy that is about to be more disruptive than any shift we have seen before.
For example, you want Medicare for all in a post employment economy rather than healthcare driven by employment. You want redistribution of wealth where the economy's productivity has been disconnected from labor. You want to focus on eliminating risks and costs like education as the ability to address those risks is lost.
The problem with incrementalism is that we really don't have time for it. By the time we start to develop policies that finally address income inequality , there will be even bigger problems to address without any tools for addressing them.
Right now, pols like Sanders offer a policy direction that is more likely to help us shift quicker to handling these economic disruptions.