Automation is increasing throughput.

We've been in a state of diminishing returns for nearly a century. But all this new technology has created a rising demand for specialized high-education labor. The pivot to China during the 90s and then India over the last decade has been an effort by capital to defer the cost of a professional workforce. But this has given birth to rivalrous superpowers who western elites don't have a firm administrative dominance over.

Culture warfare is used as a distraction to vilify those who aren’t staying afloat as immoral leaches.

Absolutely, but there are limits. Decades of cultural warfare without a cathartic conflict builds tensions and degrades institutional trust. We saw the end stage of that game in 1860 and then again in the 1930s. One function of imperialism is to outsource the irate surplus male population abroad, but we're appearing to give up on that as the cost of foreign occupation outstrips any material benefits.

So now we've got a problem of social control that's only really being kept in check by low national employment rates. If businesses start failing en mass and you end up with a large wave of unemployed, disaffected youth... well... look to 2008, 2014, and 2021 to see what happens next.

I doubt we could get to 50% without something like UBI.

I agree. But even at 8-10%, you're talking about tens of millions of unemployed people. And we can hit that number very quickly. The COVID crisis took us from 3.5% unemployment in February of 2020 to 14.3% in April. The automation of our economy is increasingly financial, and that means giving businesses the ability to rapid reduce staff at a moment's notice. When we're in a downturn, that can mean hemorrhaging jobs very quickly.

But the consequences of mass layoffs aren't invisible. Shortly after these mass firings, we experienced a wave of "supply chain failures", which prompted a big inflationary wave.