The Frontiers of an Actual New Economy, as we have called recent shifts in economic realities, is starting to emerge. It encourages disparities between full-time and part-time workers, between employees with benefits and those without, between specialty-trained employees and traditional laborers (or anyone displaced by a machine) and between upper management and seemingly everyone else. There is something intractable about the nexus of issues under discussion. One issue is education, and another is housing, and yet another is income and still another is location, and so on. Solving one of these does not solve the next, and as a result, the effort to solve just the first issue, say education, eventually does less well than anticipated…or fails outright.
A curious interaction among different areas of concern makes for formidable barriers, and they comprise some intriguing risks that seem resistant to significant change: