Technology destroys some jobs but in doing so it frees-up people to do other things. By comparison with today, the 50s were almost technology-free yet the massive growth in technological capability and the massive growth in the human population (more than doubled) has not been matched by a massive growth in unemployment. So I don't think there is a clear link.

unemployment in the west is also exarcebated by de-industrialization caused by outsourcing in the third world and these jobs will never come back, the UK is the living example of this and London in particular can give you an outlook on what's to come next at a broader level.

on top of outsourcing you've millions of unskilled immigratings picking up all the entry level and low-paid jobs leaving nothing for the locals and keeping wages below the poverty line and most of the previous protectionist laws have been dismantled in favor of a globalist open-door agenda which only favored the chinese exports so far while our industry have been killed as they couldn't compete with goods priced 10x times cheaper, this is especially true for high-tech ... believe it or not we had a very good high tech industry in EU until the '80s, now it's all gone to the dogs, fist because of the japanese, then the taiwanese, and now the chinese.

moral of the story, western capitalism is totally stacked against its own citizens and they've also turned into full blown police states.

as the cold war is gone and the menace of communism and USSR is gone, the West has no more reason to provide the same welfare and benefits we enjoyed until the '80s, every single social net will be removed one by one, little by little.

Except that's not what people are doing. They just complain and expect someone else to fix their problems for them. That seems to be the way of things nowadays. I don't buy that there aren't opportunities for the next generation. There's plenty.

i totally disagree.

until the 50s the salary of a worker or even of a clerk in a shop was enough to rent a house and feed a wife and a couple kids, now it's barely enough for yourself and to get a roof on your head, the buying power in the West is reaching the point where having a single kid is now a luxury and if you lose you job while you're over 50 you're basically Fk'ed and nobody will hire you.

20% of the workforce is probably doing fine while the remaining 80% is struggling to pay the bills and constantly kept in fear of being fired.

while we can all agree the social welfare in places like Sweden or Germany are excessive and prone to abuse there's a good reason they're still going strong.

when unemployment in america will reach the point of non-return it will be obvious to everyone that it's a failed model and unsustainable.

as witnessed already so many times in history, it will be followed by riots, uprisings, and civil wars.
in the case of the US i predict it will be both a class war and a race war.

technology is making humans obsolete and redundant, there's no fix for that, just look at Japan for instance ..

There's plenty of opportunities for people who have the right skills for jobs that are in demand and are motivated to get a job

It seems like the go-getter is a dying breed.

yes but only as long as the US limits the number of H1B visas and as the EU sticks with draconian work laws, the whole supply/demand is totally artificial and if it was for the employers they would flood the market with millions of skilled but low-paid immigrants.

the real issue i've seen in any country i visited, rich or poor, is the cost of housing.

and governments are doing absolutely nothing about this, actually they all refuse to build fair priced council homes for the poors.

as for employers soon they will ask for a master's degree even to grill burgers or to clean toilets, that's exactly the trend i'm witnessing now apart in jobs where "soft skills" are in high demand (sales in particular).

these are the direct result of governments abdicating from their natural roles and becoming a puppet of the ruling plutocrats.

where it will lead ? to high criminality, to total corruption, and ultimately to civil war.

though I would DEFINITELY NOT say SS is a 'top tier photo agency'?!?

it's a public company at NYSE and among the top 10 agencies worldwide if we talk about sales so i think we can say it's a "top tier agency" at this point.

for anything else i agree 100% SS is the LIDL/ALDI/Walmart of stock and one of the main root causes for the actual devalueing of stock photography in general.

When i say that in India people earn 1US$ per day I based on a personal communication I had with a friend on 2005 (not my personal experience because i never was in Asia before); he told me that people earn about 2 or 3 rupiahs per hour and 25 rupiahs was a dollar, so i calculated 10 hours of work about 1 dollar (1 dollar per day).

Of course as you told this is not the situation of most workers, but maybe of some of them.

By the way, did you know what is the average salary in Taiwan??

yeah but we should remember that India and Nepal are a planet apart, they've a caste system still going on strong, the millions of "Dalit" living on the street are not considered an issue by the higher castes, actually they're told they deserve to be poor since they're born Dalit ! nothing is going to change about this anytime soon.

you will see the highest disparity in wealth distribution in Indian cities and the system is totally stacked against the lower classes, once you're born poor you've no way out, no exit, you'll be stuck in a very small perimeter of action and this is true also for the poorest illiterate farmers in south east asia.

but literacy is not the magic solution, even literate white collars aren't making big money.

no solutions, because the ruling elites are pretty happy the way it is now, their entire industrial complex is based on exploiting and underpaying the lower class workers.

I personally know a large pizza store owner that has over $80,000 USD in sales and nets about $25,000 per month and doesn't want to pay his workings over $8 per hour also without any benefits! He drives a fancy 755Li BMW and lives in a 5 million house on the ocean 

25K over 80K sales ? that's a 30% net profit after tax ... which is more or less the norm in the food industry as far as i know, actually restaurants make much more but they have higher costs involved than fast foods or pizza joints.

"once you're born in the sh-it that's your natural environment."

That is a pretty patronising first world comment.

i've seen both sides of the world, and even in the first world there's a lot of people living in the sh-it by choice.

there's nothing wrong in living minimal as long as you do it by choice and not out of poverty or desperation ... actually i'm all for minimalistic lifestyle, if i could i would live in a van or RV for some time and become a "digital nomad" (in europe known as "fulltimers"), it seems to be popular among landscape photographers traveling in remote locations.

Did you watch the documentary A Dollar a Day? Its about a Mayan village where they only make a dollar a day. I actually donated to charity to help the people there after seeing the docu. They are happy people, but only make on average a dollar a day.

but some hands-on background is required to understand why in the poorest backyards of the third world people can survive with 1$/day ... i visited such places and the pattern is obvious once you get there and see the small details :

they're farmers, and most of what they need (food but also gasoline, meds, etc) they get by exchanging bags of rice, fruit/vegs, cattle, or doing some work, and this allows them to live "money free" in one way or another ... ask them how much they spend per day and they will say zero or one dollar, but in reality they spend maybe 10 kg of rice per family.

since they live off the land they can pretty much follow a quite spartan lifestyle ...rainwater in big storage tanks, water from wells, electricity from 12V batteries or diesel generators, often no electricity at all  ...

transportation .. battered down old trucks and scooters, i mean i've seen plenty of Honda Super Cub from the 60s, they must have been fixed 100 times ... and ancient chinese trucks that are considered a relic even in china !

healthcare : very basic, and again they can trade a doctor's visit with rice.

schooling : they only get village schools for kids, when they're 12 they go back work in the fields, if they've some money they send the kids in the city to enroll in high school.

i mean it's such an easy and linear life, no taxation, no burocracy, no high tech, but they all looked happy and smiling and relaxed.

the most important factor is that they're not too much impacted by inflation and their whole village is based on family clans that help each other, if one member is in deep sh-it the family will come to rescue or find some money, if somebody goes working in the city and lose his job he just goes back to the village and they know they've a roof on their head and hot meals.

the limit of this model is the scalability, it doesn't scale too well moneywise unless they sell meat or fish that pays better than rice but nobody is starving, it's quite another planet from living in a city and they don't miss anything of what we take for granted, no electricity for instance .. it's a non issue for them ... actually they love setting up a fire by night and eat together outdoors.

unpaved roads, lack of hygiene, same as above .. once you're born in the sh-it that's your natural environment.

ahhh the old "1 dollar a day" myth ....
here's the cheapest jobs i've seen in the last year so far :

- cambodia : female garment workers enslaved in chinese factories for 80-90$/month, they're often on strike asking for 150$/month but in the meantime it's 3$/day including 2 meals and transportation and such a low salary is only possible because they're women so their money adds up to the salary of their husband or their family, men will make 100-120$ even cleaning toilets and an apprentice clerk or shopkeeper makes 150$ in the capital while white collars jobs in office go from 2-300$ up and same for sales jobs + commissions and bonuses.

- vietnam : inflation booming, salaries from 150$ up.

- indonesia : more or less on par with cambodia unless we talk about Bali or Jakarta, in that case you just can't find anyone for less than 5$/day unless you provide meals and accomodation.

- philippines : similar scenario, you may heard of very cheap salaries but they include rooms and food and extras

- thailand : forget it, the minimum salary by law is now 10$/day (300 baht) and even illegal workers won't move a finger for less than 5-7$.

- malaysia : white collars earning easily 500-1000$/month, blue collars 3-400 + extras.

- singapore : salaries as high as in the west, with an army of enslaved immigrants from indonesia and philippines working for 3-400$/month which is really a pittance in Singapore but still 10-13 bucks per day ...


now ... where's this mythological land of "1 dollar per day" ?

too many red flags :

1 - not a single word is spent about salary, fees, benefits
2 - you're only hired as "freelance", not full time.
3 - no mention about career advancement, bonus packages
4 - no training provided, despite their laundry list of requirements including complex legal things like fraud detection, release, and copyright.

i know two guys doing News photos for Getty, they both started in small sh-itty local newspapers where they were paid a pittance but they earned experience and a portfolio and connections and that's how they got hired by Getty (still earning a pittance, by the way), i mean connections are probably the only way to get the foot in the door with the top newswire agencies, you won't go far applying online or sending CVs around unless you have a stunning portfolio with several news images published on the frontpage of NYT, WP,  etc

if you've no portfolio your only chance is to freelance for a local newspaper  but that's also a potential catch-22 as your town can be so boring that nothing big ever happens and therefore your images will never make the headlines on national news/media and your name will never be noticed, ideally you should focus on a specific market segment but then again you could easily end up doing the same sh-it for 20 yrs while in big cities there's always something big going on from time to time.

nikon D3200, 24MP DX sensor, 18-55 kit lens ... 450$ !

if you're good, you won't need anything else most of the time.