We must rethink world of work

■ Encouraged by your newspaper’s article on how valued and useful readers letters are (‘You have the last word’, Irish Independent, December 26), I make a resolution in the new year to intensify writing to national and local papers on what I consider the greatest challenge confronting humanity at the moment.

While I acknowledge great national challenges of homelessness, inadequate healthcare, Brexit and many other deficiencies as well as global problems of climate change and population increase, I consider the prospect of collapsing economics more immediate and critical than any other.

Social order, democracy and civilisation itself depend on a bedrock of stable and functioning economics and there is increasing evidence to indicate present thinking and ideology is no longer adequate to provide stability and distribution of wealth necessary to sustain the extraordinarily good economic situation we have attained through modern technology.

Policies driving growth and increased production that reigned for more than two centuries of the industrial revolution have become an absurdity since computerisation took production into the territory of grossly exceeding demand. Similarly nobody wants to face up to the reality that technology, which facilitates overproduction, does so by eliminating reliance on human input.

Consequently, work is being greatly diminished and unless economies rethink the whole work/job relationship, unsustainable unemployment will engulf whole nations.

Padraig Neary Co Sligo