Gimmies: (As in Gimmie a job). These are people who are willing and able to work, but have no particular skills. These are people who might have done fine in ages past, working the land, in factory, or in something like construction. However increasingly these sorts of jobs are simply vanishing. Right now in the US we have a situation where most industries are clamboring for more skilled workers, however they aren't interested in the unskilled ones that they laid off in 2009. Either they're going to be stuck with something below a "living wage" or if high minimum wage laws are passed there may simply be a great shortage of jobs for these sorts of people. I only see this as getting worse and continuing to drive income inequality and exclusion. Government support programs seems to exacerbate this as they make it somewhat comfortable to exist in this state and encourage low income single mothers to have children that may well continue the cycle.
Ghosts: I've heard our economy referred to as a "one strike" economy, and I can see that. It used to be you could just move to another town and you'd have a clean slate. These days not only does a criminal record follow you everywhere, but so does a lot else. A potential employeer can localte poor choices you've made on social media long ago or can locate the boss you told to "take this job and shove it" to see what they think of you. On this note I'm given to understand that making a fake ID using digital methods can get a kid today in a whole lot of trouble due to how our current laws are written. Again I only see this exclusionary aspect of the economy getting worse.
Dims: I recal hearing a while back that we'd crossed the 50% mark for the pecentage of elementary school kids on some kind of psychoative drug (i.e. they have ADD, ADHD, depression meds, bipolar etc etc). While to a degree there is cause for celebration in that we can treat various mental illnesses...>50%? That seems to indicate either something is going very wrong, or maybe most people have been "wrong" for a long time and it didn't matter so much. I mean is ADHD even a problem for a hunter gatherer? If you have eight kids is it a problem if two of them are bipolar and get themselves killed? In any case the worry here is that a lot of people are going to wind up unable to do much better than ghosts or dims. So we can't just solve all our problems with better schools (though we have enough of a problem getting people to take advantage of their opportunities in the good schools we do have).
Thoughts?