Combating idleness and deprivation

THERE are many ways to finish a sentence that starts with "Idle hands.." and all are somewhat negative. Some years ago, a delegate from a Gulf State at one of my conferences told the gathering "... we will soon have 40,000 young people on our streets with no jobs to go to. That is worrying us". The delegates all agreed; they too were faced with the same issues with the idle often called NEET: Not in Employment, Education or Training.

This has been a long time coming. When the Industrial Revolution accelerated in the late 1800s, most people were poor, living on less than the UN's modern cut-off of US$1.25/day. There were a few rich people, aristocrats, and land owners, but the masses worked for their living on farms or as craftsmen.

Then power-assisted machines took over from muscle power. There were revolts against the use of machinery, but its use continued and continues today as robots take over from people-power in industrial and commercial sectors. China is the globe's largest purchaser of industrial robots that displace salaried workers; and India, once the home of labour-intensive back-office work, is progressing into automated processing of crime records, legal case law, weather and climate research, insurance and financial risk analysis, healthcare demographics and more.