I would think one considerable element into this is the evolution of automation
The benefits of automation seems to have mainly gone to the owners of capital goods, the wealth gap has been rising for decades. In a sense, theoretically it could have been otherwise in a way that could have benefited employment, as what could have happened is that we could all have started to work less hours for the same total pay. This should have been workable, since automation tends to increase productivity per worker, you produce more in the same time than before, or you need less time to produce what you used to produce. Had it transpired as such, we would have distributed the workload among more people, creating jobs by it.
Afcourse, the same evolution has shifted the economy significantly to a "knowledge economy", where those who used to perform menial tasks see their jobs most easily automated away. Meanwhile, the rising wealth gap has increased the influence the economic elite has over politics. The same elites, unwilling to recognize the structural issues of the system they mainly benefit from and the effect it has on the poor, are more and more inclined to populist blaming to distract the now more angry lower classes from those structural issues. So the blame is far more put on the matter of immigration.
Granted, its neither to be ignored that immigration can be an issue, no country can just go invite everyone and expect it will necessary have good results. However, one of the great benefactors of such immigration tends to be the wealthy class, who have more and cheaper manpower to work with especially for where it regards ... menial tasks. Its a rather perverse cycle imho.
We should all, in my humble opinion, try to attain more control both of our politics and our economies, fight back elitism at it especially where it is of a nepotist form. In a peaceful and humane way though. In a sense, we have grown far to complacent as the electorate, it is as if we historically won it all when we got universal suffrage ... we are the boss however by philosophical principle of self determination, its time to reinvent our economic ideas so that it goes beyond the outdated models of capitalism and communism. For this we need a kind of "supplanting system", not to bring it about by revolution or violence or trying to reform institutions that desire to uphold a status quo, but by rebuilding from the ground up trough a system that is of that characteristic of being more efficient. Because a more efficient system growing from within can ultimately compete capitalism away by virtue of popular appeal.
And it shouldn't even be necessarily al that hard, were just not putting enough work in it. The key is with what i call "subjective value economics". Because the thing is that we tend to work usually towards a singular non universally shared metric of economic value in our system: "how much money do we have, how much growth etc", however it can easily be argued that it is not a common value necessarily that we should feel wealthier or better off for having more money or transactional tokens in our system, even by their own economic ideals of sustainability green minded people very often see no added value in further economic growth where it spurs unsustainable forms of consumerism as example. But that in itself also highlights where there is room for more efficiency that a monetary system of capitalism cannot easily provide, afterall "value is in the eye of the beholder", and capitalist monetary systems are limited in how well they can work with subjective value approximation.
In the next 2 decades, we will likely see the emergence of something that can fundamentally change economics. i call it "techno barter", it is basically a change from using money as means of goods exchange back to physical goods, yet not with the classical limitations of barter that ultimately spurred the change to monetary economics since techno barter will use the capability's of information technology, networks and algorithms to make far more complex trades possible trough combinations like parts of goods and various geographically distributed actors. It is also likely going to be the death of things like cryptocurrency's. it will take a lot of work though, bot for such platforms to develop and get popular, and for new economical models to base themself on techno barter based systems of exchange which fundamentally will be very different to how monetary economics works. The point is though that barter will allow better value approximation, afterall in a aspect where value is in the eye of the beholder a 50.000$ car is worth more to some than to others which results in a loss of potential gain for producers, in a techno barter system you choose how much you value each product in exchange both for what you get and what you want to offer. Granted, all this does not nessecarily away with the potnetial of having wealth gaps, or the fact that some own far more in terms of capital goods, technoligy, goodwill, clout etc. Yet it will add dimensions of societal values that elites wont find so easy to manipulate, and which can always outcompete them by sucking the oxygen from around them. it's .. complex, i bet a bunch of people might be a bit confused as to what i'm writing about, but this is the product of me reding and philosophizing about politics and economics for a long time, having put mental work in it, hence comming to the added conclusion that we have too few people putting in the work to develop alternative economic and political models to adress contemporary issues. We have deffinatly come to such a compex state of our human development imho, that ignorance and and lack of interrest wont bring us nessecarily further. Indeed, for that reason we will still need intelligent and enterprising people imho, it will just need to come to the point that people will need to understand who their true champions are in that sense while keeping everything under constant review.
