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9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.
21–30 of 253 posts
Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.
#22"I know you want to be hired full time by me. And I want to be doing my part. But please understand: I’m running a business. I want to make profits. And these tools are letting me make more profits by employing people only when I need them rather than carrying them on my payroll."
This is why every time I hear a politician talk about "creating jobs," I grimace. A business will hire someone if and only if they think that person's output will make more money than it will cost to employ them. Period.
Government cannot create jobs. It can make the cost of doing business less expensive by lowering taxes, or it can make the profits of a business higher by providing incentives. But for your average small business, those kinds of changes add up to much less than one person's salary, so it makes very little difference.
Government can create a good climate for businesses to exist, with laws, infrastructure and education. But those are long-term investments. Short-term, anything the government does to affect the economy is a shell game. You can't sign a law and magically make workers productive.
Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.
#23This could have been said about the industrial revolution, invention of agriculture, etc. Each time in our history when a new technology has made our lives more efficient some people have lost their jobs. In their place more jobs have been created that would never have been thought of before. Improvements in efficiency always lead to more wealth not less. As new tech companies start making money on their improvements…
I'm not so sure. I think we will continue to create highly skilled jobs, but I just don't see where unskilled labour gets a look-in in the new economy - In the past, it was reasonably easy to see where new jobs might come from, whereas I just don't see anything much coming up. We're even replacing more and more service jobs, which were what took over as farming and industry employment declined. I agree, there will pr…
If they have no skills, they never had very good prospects. Even "simple" farmhands need to have some skill at tending to the farm. It's not like you could just stand by a conveyor belt with a dumb look on your face and call yourself a factory worker for very long.
Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.
#24Comparing the unemployment rate (still bad) to the recovering GDP is sort of comparing apples to oranges, since total employment has to keep increasing in order to keep up with a growing population. Its easy to imagine a situation where our employment levels have tracked our GDP perfectly, and our high unemployment is due to a recovery that took too long rather than a shift in the economy. However, the actual data is consistent with his thesis, as shown by this graph he should have used:
http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet?request_action=w...
Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.
#25Jobs are just one way to distribute wealth. Technology has made many jobs unnecessary: it doesn't mean distributing wealth has become unnecessary.
We will eventually have to come up with other, possibly less fair, ways to do the distribution; the reason for that won't likely be because it might be considered ethical by some but because it'll cause much more trouble to not redistribute that wealth.
Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.
#26Technological unemployment is part of the picture, but there isn't a 'magic bullet' to avoid it. We need Scientists? Ask the 1800 surplus Physics PhD's that get produced every year. It's clear that the academic system uses young and smart people, but not that it produces desirable or permanent employment for them. A wise person wouldn't get involved, unless they've got one (or preferably two) parent(s) that are alrea…
Scientists are just like Machine learning pixie dust. It's fun to say, but you'd be hard pressed to find a small business that needs an astrophysicist. I don't mean to pick on astrophysicists by the way, pick any random phd, a small business probably doesn't need that.
Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.
#27From what I've heard, the consensus among economists is that the high unemployment rate isn't about lack of money or lack of will to hire. It's about lack of consumer spending. Right now, Americans are actually starting to pay down their debts and save money. This is a good thing in the long term, but makes companies hesitant to hire in the short term.
I have difficulty believing that hiring is slow due to technology. The fact of the matter is that you don't climb out of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression overnight. We just need to have patience. Some economists have estimated that it will take 10 years before our economy is fully back on track.
Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.
#28Is this the new natural unemployment rate? No. Is the unemployment rate ever going to return back to 5-6%, highly unlikely. Yes, similar things were said after every revolution like the industrial revolution or the invention of agriculture but what you have to realize is that once we got over those job issues they didn't simply vanish. With more and more efficiency from these revolutions comes more and more difficulties for the common worker who has no particular skill set. The real issue that this latest recession displayed is that people who are running these small businesses and even large corporations alike have learned what running "lean" really means. They have now realized their most bare essentials to make it through these hard economic times and now that the bar has been set it will be incredibly difficult to lift it to the previous level.
I had a discussion with a Fixed Income Desk Manager when I visited MorganStanley a few months back about this very issue and we both agreed that companies will never return to the previous level of employment. The job market is fundamentally changing and this idea that everyone has that jobs are around the corner I feel is naive. Could their possibly be an uptick in highly skilled areas of the market? I think so but besides those areas I think unskilled laborers are in for a difficult time. There will always be room in the economy for people that can do hands on jobs because somethings cannot be left up to technology alone i.e. construction or landscaping but beside these things we are moving towards a more skilled society and I think the only way the economy improves is if older unskilled workers eventually leave the job market and make way for younger more technologically savvy employees.
Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.
#29This is why I'm so against the luddite regulations of liberals - they stagnate innovation. Obsession over jobs is a terrible mentality - restructuring is extremely healthy and necessary part of economic growth, and trying to stop it is only going to hurt things.
People should be learning skills that are actually useful instead of doing robotic tasks all their lives. Robots will soon be replacing robotic people.
Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.
#30I hate when people use graphs like the one in that post "U.S. Manufacturing: Output vs. Jobs January 1972 to August 2010" and lead reader to the conclusion that the significant drop in jobs will not adversely affect the output. If you try, you can also see that output, despite the recent jump pictured, has on average started to stagnate and likely is on its way down. Now, I'm not a full-on naysayer. Like the author, I also believe that good things will come, but our economy is not out of danger and the answer is not just retraining of the unemployed to become developers, which is one of the dumnest things that I've heard lately. Our world is basically mostly f'd right now. The economy is f'd. Jobs are f'd. Politics and even war and the military are f'd. But- things will eventually get better.