I think that raising indebtedness, raising effectively the minimum acceptable wage for a large number of people is how the FED (and euro central banks) raised the standard of living.

And this worked marvelous ... until about 1987 or so where it started to result in unemployment. But luckily the economy picked up (probably due to an oil boom), and until the late nineties there was unemployment, but it wasn't growing anymore.

Something very weird happened in Japan though : no amount of indebting regular Japanese could raise wages. They tried, no wage rises, and tried again, no wage rises, and tried some more, and all the while slowly rising unemployment. Money just wasn't circulating anymore, it skipped the bottom of society. Looking at the graphs of what they did you find this incredible, but oh dear God, did they try.

Then of course the crash. People walking away from debt and dominoes started falling over when payments didn't come in, because there weren't jobs to finance them from. So the FED (again, and other central banks, this time including some asian ones) asked the government and decided to prevent the whole domino game from falling over. How ? By making policies that effectively tripled American and European people's indebtedness. Surely better jobs will become available, right ? It even worked. I think mostly because it took companies time to ship jobs overseas, and they still needed employees in the meantime.

But wages didn't rise ... and so the dominoes started falling over again. Yet no wage rises, and unemployment started spiking again, so they did it again. The same thing happened, now in 2008. And look, this time China joins the club. Luckily, the US got a break : the shale revolution. A Godsend ! Very labour intensive, high-value, no way to eliminate people from the process. Praise the lord. Not enough to do anything other than stop the unemployment rise (unemployment is only going down because people are leaving the job pool. In reality unemployment is at the 2002-2003 level). And of course, the shale boom will only last until probably about the end of next year, no more. To make matters worse, oil is about to become much less available to Europeans, and in 2-3 years the same will happen in the US.

This is a massive oversimplification. There are many connotations to make, going from wars, oil, and so on.

TLDR: we don't need people any more to make the economy run. But because the economy is still growing we do need highly educated people to figure out how to ship jobs offshore, or automate them out of existence. This will continue for a while, until we hit the next phase. You see the economy is only growing because we need more products for more people. That's where debt comes in. Because unemployment is going to spike, growth will stall. No more products needed. At that point, only one business tactic will work : lower costs, and eliminate competition. Back to the huge conglomerates of the beginning of the previous century. Explicitly try to get stuck in a local optimum. At that point we will get back to the conditions that existed before the oil boom : 90%+ unemployment as the norm. Education, aptitude, motivation all will simply be replaced by desperation.