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‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

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Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#201

Post by shostack »

VLM wrote: post #162
douche wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fine if you have an average or above IQ. There's a lot of people that don't, and no manner of training is going to rectify that hole they start in, especially with everybody else pulling ahead at the same or greater rate. Manufacturing used to be a solid living for those who were none-too-bright but capable of semi-skilled drudge work for 8-12 hours a day. More and more, those people are getting left out in th…

The classic reply to that is if those jobs were still available, we'd have to give up all our post 1950s technology. You starve people enough, hunger drives some interesting responses. If keeping your iphone means watching your kid die, lots of people will totally go for some kind of neo-Amish 1950s revival. Or just go full on Amish. Currently the Amish standard of living is somewhat higher than the general populatio…

I think the cultural differences would prevent a significant shift towards Amish culture. Maybe a shift towards living off the land, but I don't see poor middle America becoming Amish anytime soon.

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#202

Post by wolf550e »

temp-dude-87844 wrote: post #114
vinceguidry wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An economy can be based around digging holes and moving the dirt between them, if that's what people wanted to happen . We literally pulled an entire nation out of a depression in order to go to war . Fighting a war has to be the least "productive" activity imaginable for humans to engage in, yet we did it and it managed to do the opposite of break the nation's back. The only criteria is that lots of people need it a…

As an aside, fighting a war is actually one of the most productive things a society can do: it stimulates government spending and gambles that some of it will be offset by lasting post-war prosperity and the spoils of war. You can potentially eliminate unfavorable competition, acquire more land or resources open for exploitation, raid materiel and intellectual patents, all the while reducing the size of the working c…

Only in the country-vs-country zero-sum-game sense. In the grow-the-pie global-economy sense, war is a broken window fallacy.

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#203

Post by JamesBarney »

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)…

I think you're right that we need a doctor-lite but we'll have to fight the AMA tooth and nail for every extra privilege we want to give NPs.

There is no reason someone needs to spend $200,000 and 13 years of his life to say "Oh you're feeling depressed how about an SSRI? Or oh your cholesterol levels are high, how about some Lipitor?"

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#204

Post by hannele »

fullshark wrote: post #94
noobiemcfoob wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your diagnosis, but I fear the knee jerk reaction to solve it with government programs. In my mind, we need to do more lateral thinking on what can make value for the economy and why.

What's a better idea than gov't programs for adult education / job training? Most companies aren't interested in investing the resources to retrain employees unless training lasts a few months at most. Even market solutions will require a lot of gov't interference to work imo (things like job "mortgages" i.e. student loans for adults).

Companies should have an incentive to invest in the training of their employees - it seems they're always claiming that the people they're looking for just don't exist, and it comes off like they want people to emerge from the head of Athena fully-formed and ready to work to the company's specific needs.

It doesn't need to be the whole solution - regular education and training still plays a big part, because many skills are general enough - but there should be some responsibility for a company to help develop the employees that it needs. (Maybe through tax incentives or what-have-you.)

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#205

Post by knieveltech »

dragonwriter wrote: post #123
wavefunction wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Folks who worked in manufacturing plants like automobile factories were considered part of the middle class, before neoliberal globalism reduced their earning potential and employment opportunities.

For a while, people who worked in manufacturing jobs, saved and invested surplus income over a career, etc., could often reach the classic capitalist-economy definition of middle class (neither predominantly dependent on wage labor nor having enough capital to meet support needs plus accumulate more capital purely by renting others labor to apply to the capital) by late in their career. That is no longer as attainabl…

I think you're overstating the importance of tax rates here. They certainly play a role but interest rates are a much more critical driver. For a period of time it was possible to make 7-15 percent interest on certificates of deposit.

Re: ‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing

#206

Post by JohnTHaller »

the8472 wrote: post #89
JohnTHaller wrote: post #54

Welding machine operators are a drop in the bucket compared with the biggest looming job shift on the horizon: truck drivers. It's the most commonly listed job in 29 states and there are millions of them across the US. And most will be replaced by automated driving systems within the next couple decades. Yes, there will be service jobs within trucking, but that will be a small fraction of the 'routine' jobs that auto…

> truck drivers. It's the most commonly listed job in 29 states This has been brought up previously in HN discussions. It's an artifact of arbitrary binning choices.

Regardless, there are still around 3 million of them. That's not a small number.
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