The foreboding article concludes, “While we are fast running out of use for people, we are at the same time ironically producing people faster than ever.” Those fears never materialized as fact, not even in the face of another tremendous disruption of the status quo. In 1950, the US labor force participation rate of women was about 33 percent; by the turn of the century, it had nearly doubled. Tens of millions of women began working during those decades; that didn’t result in tens of millions of men losing their jobs.
