Life in the western world isn't going to be as good as it used to from now on. Less and less labour is needed and companies are outsourcing labour to cheaper countries. The standard of living in those cheap labour countries like China and India is going to rise while the standard of living in the affluent west is going downhill. Our generation is way more educated than our parents' generation yet we are going to be earning less than them. Home ownership rates are going to decrease significantly and the middle-class will shrink. It's not the end of the world but the standard of living is going to revert back to how things were like in the early 1900s. You can't make a living off minimum wage jobs (unless you call living in poverty and debt a living. Minimum wage is supposed to be for high school and college kids who live with their parents and want the disposable income to have a social life and buy material things. It's not suitable for raising a family or overqualified college graduates) and people are struggling to get even that (mainly because lots of applicants are overqualified for these positions and employers tend to be distrustful of overqualified candidates. Thinking that they will jump ship to a better paying job at the earliest opportunity. Which makes sense.)
The economy will eventually get better to some extent though (it just won't be what it used to be at the height of the middle class and home ownership). As more and more westerners go unemployed or underemployed, they aren't going to be buying so much shit. People won't be spending so much money while going out with their friends, will lay off the big screen TVs, the clothes, the fancy shoes, the video games, the iPhones and iPods, the Blackberry's, etc. and then the companies selling all this shit will be fucking themselves over. When they realize that you need to give the affluent west jobs so that they can keep this orgy of capitalism going (because you damn well know that the cheap labourers in China aren't going to be buying all this shit!), then they'll start hiring westerners again.
Capitalism is a two way street. In an economy that is heavily dependent on people buying shit they don't need, you need to give these people decent paying jobs in order to have the freakin money to spend in the first place. For these companies to focus so much on labour saving methods and technology and outsourcing is short-sighted.
