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‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

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Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#181

Post by antisthenes »

Ensorceled wrote: post #65

There are a fair number of comments dismissing this issue with a "retrain or get left behind" and expressing not a lot of sympathy for those who don't. Remember, the average IQ in the US is just below 100[1]. Exactly what kind of jobs do you expect to retrain these people for? And how are they equipped to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps? Most of these jobs provided on the job training or apprenticeships so…

The issue isn't just driving jobs, or at least that's only part of the more complex issue.

In reality, it's more like a "death by a thousand cuts".

To give you a concrete example, I work in e-commerce and part of the automation we're building will eliminate 2 full-time jobs on the side of the manufacturer - people who are just entering orders manually, instead of using some form of EDI that forwards the order from the customer directly to the dropshipper. While that sounds insignificant, consider that this is only for a single business relationship between 2 fairly small companies.

There are tens of thousands of companies like this in the US and once those automated systems are in place, those jobs aren't coming back.

Believe it or not, there are still lots of things being done by hand in small and medium-sized businesses, my guess is automation could easily shrink their required labor by 10-15% over the next decade as well.

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#182

Post by metaphorm »

tptacek wrote: post #175
metaphorm wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a person who _wants_ to be an elder-care service provider will not find it spiritually corrosive. a person who is forced to re-train to work in elder care because the job they used to perform was automated/off-shored is much more likely to find it spiritually corrosive. a young person seeking employment at the beginning of their career might find it deeply troubling as well (assuming there were not enough good altern…

Then what's "corrosive" is the loss of jobs. Please leave older people out of it.

No, I won't, and shouldn't leave older people out of it. This is absolutely central regardless of whether or not you acknowledge it.

Whether a society prioritizes its future or its past is an important social, economic, political, and moral decision. Suppose that demographic trends lead to a massive boom of elder-care jobs that is supported (in the short term anyway) economically and "solves" an employment crisis for the younger generation. Is that a solution worth doing?

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#183

Post by tptacek »

metaphorm wrote: post #182
tptacek wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then what's "corrosive" is the loss of jobs. Please leave older people out of it.

No, I won't, and shouldn't leave older people out of it. This is absolutely central regardless of whether or not you acknowledge it. Whether a society prioritizes its future or its past is an important social, economic, political, and moral decision. Suppose that demographic trends lead to a massive boom of elder-care jobs that is supported (in the short term anyway) economically and "solves" an employment crisis for…

I don't get the sense that you're really thinking through how economies work. The "massive boom of elder-care jobs" isn't a result of secular decline in manufacturing; it's due to increased demand for elder care as our population ages. That increase would occur even if no manufacturing job had ever left our shores in the last 70 years.

You're unhappy that people who were doing a job can no longer do that job, and putting yourself in their shoes when they confront the possibility that their economic best interests are in jobs they don't want to do. That's fine; that is in fact a real challenge in how societies engage with market economies. But it has nothing to do with older people; it has to do with the fact that not everyone can make a living doing the exact job they want to do.

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#184

Post by antisthenes »

tptacek wrote: post #172
kwhitefoot wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with nurse? It has a quite specific meaning. Changing it medical associate just makes it less precise. What's needed is for sexism to be eradicated everywhere; changing the names is not going to do that.

The gendering of the term is a small problem. The big problem is that it connotes things that are no longer true of the role. For instance: nurse-practitioners are first-line health care professionals whose job isn't to assist doctors (as most nurses do), but rather to prevent people from needing to see them in the first case, even when they're ill. The market as a whole needs to come to the understanding that we (a)…

The term "physician assistant" seems pretty gender neutral and appropriate.

They have similar education requirements to a nurse and perform (in practice) similar functions.

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#185

Post by tptacek »

antisthenes wrote: post #184
tptacek wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gendering of the term is a small problem. The big problem is that it connotes things that are no longer true of the role. For instance: nurse-practitioners are first-line health care professionals whose job isn't to assist doctors (as most nurses do), but rather to prevent people from needing to see them in the first case, even when they're ill. The market as a whole needs to come to the understanding that we (a)…

The term "physician assistant" seems pretty gender neutral and appropriate. They have similar education requirements to a nurse and perform (in practice) similar functions.

No, because they're not physicians assistants. They can see patients independently and prescribe drugs without ever interacting with a doctor. The NP practices at places like Walgreens don't even have doctors on staff.

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#186

Post by metaphorm »

tptacek wrote: post #183
metaphorm wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I won't, and shouldn't leave older people out of it. This is absolutely central regardless of whether or not you acknowledge it. Whether a society prioritizes its future or its past is an important social, economic, political, and moral decision. Suppose that demographic trends lead to a massive boom of elder-care jobs that is supported (in the short term anyway) economically and "solves" an employment crisis for…

I don't get the sense that you're really thinking through how economies work. The "massive boom of elder-care jobs" isn't a result of secular decline in manufacturing; it's due to increased demand for elder care as our population ages. That increase would occur even if no manufacturing job had ever left our shores in the last 70 years. You're unhappy that people who were doing a job can no longer do that job, and put…

once again you're arguing against a strawman. you've now completely abandoned trying to engage with what I've said and have instead favored the approach of trying to make me seem "stupid" with discredited rhetorical devices.

additionally, where do you get off acting as if you're an authority on economics? you're nothing special. stop acting as if you're automatically correct. you have something to say, then say it, argue your point and support it. simply phrasing things as if you're authoritative only makes you seem arrogant. it's not convincing.

finally, by choosing to deliberately ignore what I offered as the more important dimension of my position (the moral one, rather than the economic one) you have derailed the entire conversation into something nearly irrelevant.

in other words, you're not worth the time. we're done here.

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#187

Post by synicalx »

jcbeard wrote: post #76

Same basic trend we saw with industrial revolution. People lost their somewhat skilled (for the time) jobs to steam powered machines. As the recent election also put front and center, we're also competing with the entire planet for jobs. How do we compete with the Terminator and the foreigner bogeyman? You don't directly. Nations build a social safety net that cushions the churn of jobs, universal healthcare so that…

Cutting a defence budget is never going to be helpful especially by such a large amount - you're going to lose jobs, lives, security, and given how widely US troops are deployed you're going to lose even more stability in many parts of the world.

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#188

Post by dragonwriter »

tptacek wrote: post #172
kwhitefoot wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with nurse? It has a quite specific meaning. Changing it medical associate just makes it less precise. What's needed is for sexism to be eradicated everywhere; changing the names is not going to do that.

The gendering of the term is a small problem. The big problem is that it connotes things that are no longer true of the role. For instance: nurse-practitioners are first-line health care professionals whose job isn't to assist doctors (as most nurses do), but rather to prevent people from needing to see them in the first case, even when they're ill. The market as a whole needs to come to the understanding that we (a)…

> For instance: nurse-practitioners are first-line health care professionals whose job isn't to assist doctors (as most nurses do)

I don't think "assisting doctors" is actually what most nurses do; most nurses work under the clinical supervision of a physician (and that's also true of NPs in a majority of US jurisdictions; there are 20 states where they have "full practice authority".)

In any case, since NPs are RNs with additional qualifications (they are actually a name for some specialities of advance practice registered nurses), it makes sense that they are called nurses.

> Not many people feel they can switch careers in mid-life to become a doctor. But people routinely go to nursing school for a career switch. It would be good if more people did this, specifically to get NP status.

NP status (or APRN more generally, regardless of specialty) takes substantially more education than RN, and a lot of the people who go back to school for nursing don't even get to the RN level, just LVN/LPN. Changing the name isn't going to change that.

Anyway, the non-nurse physician-lite you are talking about isn't the NP, it's the Physician Assistant. While the scope of practice is somewhat similar, the latter is abbreviated training of the type provided to physicians, the latter is advanced training of the type provided to nurses; they are different models. An NP or other APRN is a nurse with advanced training and certification which allows them to do some things without supervision of a physician, a physician assistant is a reduced-qualification physician with a correspondingly narrowed scope of practice. You seem to be interested in the latter, but think that the former is the same thing with a poorly chosen name rather than a distinct and different thing with some overlap in role.

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#189

Post by beguiledfoil »

metaphorm wrote: post #146
beguiledfoil wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but I can't imagine that there is a reasonable economic case to be made for it Median net worth of a retiree is $210,000. Many have saved for care in retirement and therefore will be able to 'demand' it in the market. And I don't believe that includes income from Social Security (which is just a forced savings plan). >It seems to me that what is needed is alternative industries that are booming because they create n…

word soup would be a sentence that doesn't even parse. you're misusing the term in an effort to beat me down with the force of your snark. cut it out. do I actually need to explain it to you? I will anyway, in word sandwiches, since you might prefer that instead of soup. Re-training assembly line workers to be barristas, mall parking lot attendants, and elder-care nurses is not an acceptable outcome. There is increas…

>word soup would be a sentence that doesn't even parse

I use it to describe sentences where I can jumble up all the adjectives and get the same meaning - a meaning which is so vague that people can just interpret the sentence as something that conveniently agrees with their prior convictions

>Ideally, those industries are _generative_. That means they are primarily involved in production (of raw materials, of manufactured goods, of energy).

Your prior conviction is that new stuff is needed and intrinsically good. I am not so bold as to hold such a conviction. Maybe people simply need to be enabled to do more with less.

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#190

Post by dragonwriter »

tptacek wrote: post #185
antisthenes wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The term "physician assistant" seems pretty gender neutral and appropriate. They have similar education requirements to a nurse and perform (in practice) similar functions.

No, because they're not physicians assistants. They can see patients independently and prescribe drugs without ever interacting with a doctor. The NP practices at places like Walgreens don't even have doctors on staff.

> No, because they're not physicians assistants. They can see patients independently and prescribe drugs without ever interacting with a doctor.

In a minority of jurisdictions in the US, NPs can practice without the supervision of a physician, whereas PAs, in all jurisdictions, must be in a relationship with a supervising physician. But both PAs and NPs, generally, can see patients and prescribe medications, within state-specified limits, without interacting with a physician in the course of performing that function.

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