Most of the first world is now in a post-full-employment era, the issue is that our societies aren't geared to deal with it.

If you look at the productivity gains through automation since the 1970s, there's no chance of seeing the manufacturing jobs come back. Even if all the manufacturing was to come back, it wouldn't employ half the people that had those jobs prior to the 1970s. The US population has grown by 50% since the 1970s.

The same thing is now happening to white collar jobs, which is honestly no big surprise. Management by MBAs is applying the same "successful" pattern to white collar jobs as it did to blue collar jobs. So employee morale and engagement is at an historical low, which impacts the bottom line, which is speeding up the process. White collar jobs are now supposed to recycle in the "service industry".

In the past three years, my team was halved while the workload quadrupled. We're now declared a productivity bottleneck by the management (against all metrics), so we're getting outsourced in the next 18 months.