With Your question you simply hit the spot !!! 

Even if the question seems a bit altruistic (and idealistic) it is at the same time of great importance for the future of societies living in times of growing inequality.

Jacek, thanks for your comment.  I was not intending to be a bit altruistic, but entirely self centered.  In the last chapter of the book linked above much evidence is presented, as well as a theoretical model into which it fits, that inhomogeneity is perhaps the leading factor in human risk, including the risk of instability and collapse in society.  So I am doing nothing but looking out for myself.

I will also argue that the question is not idealistic, by two methods.  First, I'll point out that successful businessmen Thomas Edison and Henry Ford adopted this view, especially Ford, who doubled the salary of ALL his workers over one weekend when he realized that he was setting the industrial wage benchmark and that if his workers couldn't buy cars, others could not either.  It was a profit motive!

An example of unenlightened management is a story I overheard a few years ago from someone formerly the I.T. director of a big east coast bank.  They had him evaluate moving the entire bank data processing overseas.  He told management that if everyone did this, they'd have no customer base in the U.S.  They told him everyone wouldn't do it!  Of course everyone did.  These same financial and business geniuses gave us the financial crisis of 2009.

For my final argument that the question is not idealistic, I'll simply list "solutions" to stability problems induced by inhomogeneity in the past:

• War which is thorough enough to wipe out most wealth and productivity, thus stimulating full employment for reconstruction (e.g. WWII in Germany and Japan, Vietnam War in Vietnam, etc.)
• Ethnic cleansing in which an ethnically identifiable trait associated with inhomogeneity is forcibly removed (e.g. Palestinean departure from Israeli territory, Sadam Hussein's forced migrations within Iraq, etc.)
• Genocide, which still seems to be a popular solution, and is possibly occurring in several places today
• Purges and re-education ... such as in Soviet Russia under Stalin.  This example also shows it is not always the bottom classes which are eliminated.

It should be possible to offer solutions which are not nearly as horrific as those, but which still fall far short of idealism.

In fact, I would define idealism in a particular way: Idealism is believing that an idea works, and implementing it, whether it works or not, and especially even if it doesn't.  I'll give two examples of such ideas, one on the left and one on the right.

• Left wing idealism often supposes one can give direct grants to the less fortunate in order to reduce economic inhomogeneity (roughly, inequality).  But in the risk model in the book above, we see that this reduces the impact of risky behavior to nearly zero, since losses are always made whole by new grants, and so stability risk increases rather than decreases.  It doesn't have to be "welfare" to be a direct grant.  A subsidy to health insurance is a direct grant.  See the literature on risk compensation for many examples of this.
• Right wing idealism often supposes that if one is forced to accept 100% responsibility for one's own destiny (no possibility of subsidy or grant ever) then the extreme cost of failure will inspire everyone (or almost everyone) to work very hard and succeed.  This fails to take into account two things.  First, we all have different abilities, and very few have the ability to succeed in any environment, even when jobs are not available, or land for farming.  And second, that in an unregulated economy, suppliers may take the antithesis of my question and attempt to reduce labor to zero, mistakenly sabotaging their own markets.  

In both cases it is the intellectual elite who have made miscalculations.  It is also possible, in a democracy, to imagine a 3rd path in which a divided quasi-intellectual electorate takes absolute control, and simply thrashes around without a coherent strategy messing things up.  Like the U.S. today.

Hi Remi, yes I have studied the evolution you mention extensively and written a 300 page book about it.  See link below.  The accumulation of wealth possible through agriculture seems to have expanded the size of individual groups to where two things happen:

• The accumulation of wealth is great enough to tempt rivals, and the weapon technology for a successful surprise attack (bow and arrow) forces even larger concentrations of humans for mutual self defense.
• The elite eventually lose control of the situation internally and chaos results, beginning substantially at the fall of the Bronze Age as far as historical records are concerned.

Regarding population, there are several possible views to take.  First, it grows fastest at the lowest economic levels.  If those people had jobs, they would have fewer babies.  As a member of the lower levels of the elite, which I think even the middle class are in the U.S., it seems this would be in my interest, and I'm asking for collaborators on how to bring it about.  If we have to make "adjustments" to the mind set of the small number of upper elite, I think we have the intellectual and democratic power tools to do it.  The first problem is to identify the change.  I reject the notion that it exists within the repetitive tried over and over again ideologies.

Second, the Earth has a lot of unused area and can support a much larger population comfortably, but we have taboos against developing the climate control technology necessary to make it rain in the Sahara or the western desert U.S. or warm up in Siberia.  Well, perhaps we have the technology, but a lot of people want to stop using it because of the flooding of coastal areas and island nations which could instead be built up in the fashion of The Netherlands, Venice, or that stupid island in the South China Sea that it looks like we are about to go to war over.  I am being facetious to make a point, but really even the eastern part of the U.S. is lightly populated except in cities, and southern Siberia practically not at all, but there are almost no jobs in either place except in very large cities or where there are government installations (e.g. Novosibirsk, where my wife is from).

So, I think we have enough cell phones, cars and appliances in the U.S.  We need jobs spread around the habitable area.  And in other parts of the world as well.  The jobs would reduce the birth rate.  But there is no technology which produces jobs, apparently.

BY THE WAY, speaking of evolution and agriculture, there was a 1987 article attacking agriculture as the worst mistake of the human race.  Very seriously.  Discover article http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race PDF version http://www.sigervanbrabant.be/docs/Diamond.PDF 

http://www.amazon.com/Money-Wealth-War-Robert-Shuler-ebook/dp/B00UIPW4E2

What makes you think I want more humans?  I merely indicate how poorly organized humanity is, creating people without creating something for them to do or places for them to live.  The question at hand is, how to make it so that the real goals of society are the goals of business.  Currently business is paid for making things worse by obsoleting human labor and not providing the billions of necessary new jobs to keep people from going unstable.  They will also have fewer children if employed, which seems to be aligned with your goals.  : )

Re Remi: "What we are talking about here is family planning for the planet."

- Remi, what you are talking about, not my question about corporate motive and profit basis.

Re Remi: "However I don't want a planed economy, I don't want someone deciding my fate from birth to death, what I should learn, what job I should do."

- 100% agreement.  Been tried.  Didn't work.

Re "We need a free, capitalist system"

- also been tried, didn't work.

Re "with its own checks and balances"

- My thought is not what you meant, but when capitalism was competing with communism in 1st half of 20th century and implemented checks and balances (now largely gone), it seemed to work better.  I cannot say whether it was stable.

Re: " as to how big a family people have but they never listen and breed like rabbits."

- People with jobs largely breed at very low rates, not even self sustaining, unless driven by a strong religious ideology (or sociopathology, which is a small percent of the population so far).  This requires no planning or checks and balances.

Re: "Women's rights, the middle class lifestyle (hey, think of all the fun you could be having with your money, if you didn't have so many kids)"

- I have one child that was born when I was age 63, which has not so far had any effect on my finances.  And very little on my activities since I already was declining in activity.

ALL - The conversation has gotten a bit sidetracked.  I do appreciate the attention on the thread, but I would like to get back to the question.  How, in a free market, to make it more obvious to businesses that their long term profitability depends on producing employment or other business opportunity along with products?

Here are some ideas to get the discussion going, since there have been no specific proposals.  But really, I'm looking for fresh ideas.

• Start a Foundation to sponsor grants to researchers studying job creation incentives for free markets.
• Modify the World Trade Organization to discourage trade based on either labor cost or automation, and encourage trade based on natural resource distribution.
• Phase out payroll taxes and replace with an equal amount of tax on corporate revenue (not profits, revenue), in order to provide social security and other services funded from payroll taxes as payroll taxes decline in the robotic and automated jobless future.
• Phase out tax on earned income very slowly, tied to the decline in percentage of earned income as the importance of jobs decreases, and replace it with a proportionate combination of sales and unearned income taxes.

An addition: stop outsourcing to other countries.

Robert,

If I understand Your way of thinking, there must be a way (or method) in order to increase the importance of employment to businesses. This would have an impact on social (but economic) safety for employees, but also sustain the economic demand, since business depends on demand. 

Let's think in terms of a model. Usually, in standard macroeconomic models firms are profit oriented. In microeconomic and marketing models the aspect of market share is also addressed.

So, a structurat change You request and claim must eventually result in a shift, or rather in a change of businesses preference. 

Am I right?

Best regards ;-)

Jacek, a very good summary of the problem, yes.  It can even be viewed as a matter of business IQ.  Henry Ford was smart enough to understand he could increase his profit by paying his workers more.  In my opinion, the current generation of business leaders is either simply stupid, or planning to enjoy life until they die and not worry about any future.  I do not think this is actually the case.  But it is possible that today's magnates think that everyone really should be as smart as they themselves are.  Musk and Jobs are known for being bitterly critical, for example, suggesting they were holding people to an excessively high standard.

By the way, ran across a study over the weekend projecting 47% of today's jobs will be automated within 20 years.

http://www.shnugi.com/will-your-job-be-automated/