John Stackhouse, Editor-in-Chief of The Globe and Mail, from Davos, World Economic Forum, January 25
The new digital divide – it used to be about access, now it is about employment – stands to further isolate the millions of long-term jobless people in Europe and North America, many of whom have left the workforce and won’t be getting calls when jobs come back.
Some governments see this as a call for an overhaul of their educational systems, to be replaced by life-long learning programs that assume that much of the population will be back in class at age 40, 50 and 60, and probably for a good many hours in between. Globally there are an estimated 200 million unemployed. A Davos forum on the issue was told that number could hit 250 million by 2018.
The prescient author of this blog dealt with this problem in a novel more than forty years ago. It is called The Leisure Riots. It is available in the Toronto Public Library, but only for reference, and at amazon.ca, indigo.ca and abebooks.com.
Maybe re-publish as an e-book? It might have to get retyped but undoubtedly that expense can be recouped.
Probably no need to retype. There is good OCR (optical character recognition) software nowadays, which permits one to scan a document into a word-processor, and then with some cleanup editing it’s ready to go.