PERSPECTIVE ON THE ECONOMY : New Jobs, Obsolete Workers : We still offer industrial-age nostrums for unemployment in a world of ever-changing, high-skilled needs.

The upheaval that swept America from Los Angeles to Atlanta last week is more than a protest against police brutality or a symptom of age-old ills. It reflects a dangerous new kind of racism and a new, far more intractable kind of unemployment--both with implications that reach beyond the United States.

They spring from a new system of wealth creation that is spreading swiftly through all the affluent nations, destroying the “mass society” of the industrial past.

The invention of agriculture thousands of years ago launched the First Wave of social transformation in history. The Industrial Revolution triggered a Second Wave. Today a Third Wave of techno-social change is sweeping through all high-tech countries, hitting the United States harder, and California the hardest.

The Industrial Revolution created mass societies. In them, mass production was paralleled by mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass political parties, mass communications, mass entertainment and mass welfare services. Homogeneity was their ruling principle.

Today’s Third Wave of change shatters the industrial mass society. The new governing principle is hetero-geneity. Thus, in the United States, Japan and Europe, mass production is increasingly being replaced by “de-massified” manufacturing based on short runs of heterogeneous and even customized products made in flexible, computer-driven factories. The mass market is simultaneously breaking into “niche” markets defined and organized by computers. Consumption is being de-massified in parallel with production.

The standard industrial family unit of the mass society--into which almost everyone was supposed to fit--was the “nuclear” family, composed of a working father, a stay-at-home mom and two children under the age of 18. Today only about 5% of American families fit this Second Wave model. Today’s society gives rise to a wide variety of familial relationships, ranging from single motherhood to serial or successive marriage and so-called “sandwich” families in which a middle-aged couple takes responsibility for both its children and its parents. In the poorest of communities, single mothers and out-of-wedlock children are virtually the norm.

The deep de-massification process, which is now hitting many countries, has also direct impacts on ethnic or race relations.

During the Second Wave era, the industrial economy needed a standardized, mass labor force. During the early period of industrialization, the United States, unlike Europe, suffered from frequent labor shortages as workers migrated westward.

The rising industrial elites solved this problem by substituting energy and innovative technology for labor. Politically, they enacted open immigration policies. Thus, polyglot workers flooded into the United States from all over the world.

To increase labor efficiency, it was necessary to homogenize or massify the workers. Hence there arose the “melting pot” ideal that told immigrants to slough off their old culture and to re-emerge with new, wholly American identities. But while many different cultures and religions were assimilated, Americans, including the new ones, resisted the integration of non-Caucasian races into the society. African-Americans in particular had to fight every inch for entry into the economy and society on an equal basis with others, and have not yet succeeded. For generations they formed the last reserve of the labor force, given jobs only when all other labor pools where exhausted, as was the case during World War II.

One result of all this was continuing conflict between the white majority and the black minority as each competed for employment. This was the background for old industrial-style racism and it has some similarities to the situation in the European nations that invited Turks, North Africans and others to fill jobs at the bottom of the ladder during economic expansion in the 1960s and ‘70s.

As the Third Wave arrived, however, the needs of the advanced economies shifted, and so did public attitudes toward immigration, integration and assimilation.

In the United States, and especially in Los Angeles, the melting pot has been replaced by the so-called “salad bowl” concept, under which ethnic, religious, racial and other groups retain their cultural identity yet, at the same time, demand dignity, justice and equal access to economic opportunity.

This Third Wave alternative to the Second Wave melting pot is, in fact, nothing more than de-massification applied to intergroup relations as the whole society becomes more heterogenous.

In the United States, it has produced a far more complex mosaic of racial and ethnic groupings. Tensions between majority and minority are now overlaid by minority vs. minority conflicts, as between Koreans and blacks in Los Angeles, or between Cubans and Haitians in Miami.

All these community conflicts are intensified by a structural change: A Third Wave economy simply does not have enough routine factory jobs for the Rodney Kings of the world--or, for that matter, for the racist skinheads who beat up blacks and Asians in California or Turks and North Africans in Europe.

Second Wave smokestack societies, based on repetitive, mindless labor, need such workers. The Third Wave economy, by contrast, is simply closed to larger and larger numbers of unskilled workers, irrespective of pigmentation.

Newer companies are the “basics” of the Third Wave economy spreading swiftly across the United States, Europe, Japan and other regions. It is an economy whose primary resources are brain power, innovative creativity, rapidly learned and unlearned skills, organization transience and post-bureaucratic forms of authority. It is an economy dependent on instantaneous communication, computerization on a vast, globe-gridling electronic infrastructure and, above all, on new attitudes and even newer (and ever-changing) skills.

This Third Wave economy--a new system for creating wealth--is not going to go away. The smokestacks and assembly lines of the Second Wave past are not going to reappear. They, and the jobs they supplied, are gone forever.

Having failed to prepare for the Third Wave economy that futurists and others foresaw in the early 1960s, today’s politicians stoop to demagogy. They demand protectionism--as though that would put workers back on the old-fashioned, pre-robotic assembly lines. They demand more mass welfare--as though more bureaucratic programs could solve the larger problem. Or they brandish free-market banners, as though the free market alone, without intelligent support and direction, would solve all the ills produced by the greatest techno-social transformation since the Industrial Revolution.

Politicians seem unaware that their Second Wave nostrums for unemployment are obsolete. In the old muscle-based, mass-manufacturing economy, politicians could employ Keynesian or monetarist measures to stimulate the economy. This might create 1 million jobs, and the jobless workers would return to the factory or office.

In today’s Third Wave economies you can create 5 million or even 10 million jobs--but many of the jobless workers won’t be able to fill them. They lack the requisite skills. What’s more, the needs keep changing, so that even workers who have high skills face obsolescence unless they learn still higher ones.

In Third Wave societies, unemployment goes from quantitative to qualitative, which is why it is structural, intractable and incurable with the remedies proposed by economists and politicians still trapped in Second Wave thinking.

And it is why there can be no solution until a Third Wave revolution sweeps away today’s Second Wave schools and replaces them with completely new learning institutions that no longer resemble the rust-belt factories of yesterday.

It is the failure of any political leadership to come to terms with a future that stares America--and all the other high-tech nations--in the face. Where there is no vision, cliches proliferate, people perish and cities burn.