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We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

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Re: We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

#21

Post by scythe »

The argument, then, is that our ability to produce will outstrip our desire to consume, and so a fraction of people will be able to produce enough things for everyone to consume, which will lead to the rest not having jobs.

The problem with the argument is that it does not really appear to me that our ability to produce has outstripped our desire to consume. The buying of things is currently rather high, and product shortages are not entirely uncommon. Rather, people cannot get paid a first-world living wage to produce the things we desire to consume, or they do not have the skills required to produce those things, etc.

Somewhat related: are most other countries currently suffering high unemployment, or just America? If the answer is 'no', that seems to contradict the thesis of the article.

Re: We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

#22

Post by mdasen »

Do you have everything you want in life? I don't just mean, "do you have everything you want of what you could purchase with money today?" I mean everything you could want.

Articles like this one make me feel like there isn't a lot left to do in the world - that we're close to stopping our progress toward better living standards. If we are stopping or slowing our progress toward higher living standards, then yes efficiencies do kill jobs.

I don't see a jobless future. I see a future with a different mix of jobs. To be fair, the author does touch upon this a little as s/he is encouraging investment toward new industries. However, I don't share the author's sense that these new industries and new economies will definitionally employ fewer people. Automation and efficiencies have been seen since the industrial revolution. Two centuries in, all this automation doesn't seem to have driven unemployment to a skyward trend over the long run.

If we were pursuing a finite goal, greater efficiency would mean that we would need less labor. However, I don't believe that our quest for better lives is a finite goal. People are always talking about things they wished existed or things they wished they had. That sounds shallow, but I don't just mean commodities; I also mean medical treatments. As labor becomes freed from current tasks, it can be put toward other uses.

That doesn't mean it will be easy, but I think we're going to continue raising our standard of living and creating a better world. And that will require labor.

Re: We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

#23

Post by michaeldhopkins »

bsaunder wrote: post #13

If government wants to create jobs, they need to encourage businesses to create new value (by paying them to create that value). Employers will then hire people to create the value (and pay them (after skimming enough profit off the top to make it worth the effort)). The problem is, of course this requires the government to spend more (not less) which seems strongly against the current momentum. I'd suggest the moder…

Well, it's against the momentum because to okay such expenses, a culture must be created which okays many, many other expenses, and right now they are a bit of a threat to our being able to maintain current value-encouragement programs, let alone add new ones.

I don't think that centralizing the value creation incentive engine was good anyway, but now it's barely possible.

Re: We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

#24

Post by pg »

"Our new economy is shrinking because technology leads to efficiency over growth."

Anyone who wants to make the claim that technology is net killing jobs has to be prepared to answer the question: why now? Technology has been killing (but not net killing) jobs for centuries. It's possible that technology could start to net kill jobs. But why now, when it hasn't in the past?

Re: We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

#25

Post by dreamdu5t »

dreamdu5t wrote: post #2

LoL Don't fill the potholes? Who the fuck fills them then!?

Downvoted because my post is snarky?

My point is factually valid.

Public works DO create jobs, it's an empirical fact. Just because the OP hates the idea doesn't mean public works don't create jobs. Maybe he thinks UPS should fill the potholes, but either way, the only way to fill them is to hire people to fill them, whether the government or private business does it doesn't change the fact that someone was hired to do it.

Re: We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

#26

Post by ericd »

ikarous wrote: post #14
protomyth wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how wide a search area is the job search? is relocation an option?

Thanks for asking. He's been searching in the Bay Area and in the Dallas / Fort Worth metroplex primarily. Relocation is certainly an option; in fact, we would both love to live in the Bay Area, and it's a good chance that I could find rewarding work there. We're willing to spend time living apart if that's what it takes, but obviously that's not our first choice.

A lot of companies in the Bay Area can't find enough good programmers, even while offering very high salaries. If he has some downtime between his job hunt, it'd probably be very good for his eventual prospects if he spent some time learning to program and practiced, practiced, practiced.

I imagine it has a good number of uses in Civil Engineering as well (modeling? automating repetitive tasks?).

Re: We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

#27

Post by cjy »

ChristianMarks wrote: post #10

The OP's post could use some context. Ricardo’s concept of comparative advantage was forged in a world where labor and capital were essentially fixed. England could weave cloth more efficiently than Spain, but Spain could make wine more efficiently than England. Therefore, they would both benefit from trade given that each of these countries had a comparative benefit or efficiency to offer. The assumption under compa…

You don't understand comparative advantage. As long as there is scarcity, comparative advantage matters. There were 24 hours in a day when Ricardo was around and there still are today.

There are theoretical cases under which trade can make a country worse off, but they are rare situations and cannot be simplified down to "inputs flow around today but didn't during Ricardo's days". That doesn't even make sense.

But what bugs me most about your post is your belief that we should work to keep wages high for overpaid middle class American by prohibiting poor Chinese and Indians from having access to world markets where they might actually earn their marginal product. People are all for drinking fair trade coffee and supporting AID's programs in Africa. But when it comes to having to compete on a level playing field with foreign workers all that altruism goes out the window.

Re: We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

#28

Post by dockd »

_delirium wrote: post #3

While this is not necessarily untrue, the prediction has been made a few times before, most notably during the early-20th-century wave of automation. Even the rather intelligent Bertrand Russell wrote a book in 1923, "The Prospects of Industrial Civilization", which spent a good deal of time worrying about that problem (though some of the other stuff he worried about did come closer to being true, like the prevalence…

The original author lists companies that didn't exist prior to the rise of the personal computer (CompUSA? Circuit City?). If you'd taken an employee from 2009 and brought them back to 1970, their job literally wouldn't have existed. How about everyone working for AT&T Wireless, Sprint, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile? Where was the cell phone industry in 1990? 1980?

Who in their right mind is going to tell you they're going to be employed by something that doesn't yet exist?

It's hard to look at the world today and see how the status quo projects forward. But if you don't mind wild ideas (personal computers! portable phones!) and can wait a decade, maybe things don't look so bad.

Counterpoint: What do I do during that decade?

*Creativity exercise: think of some things. What if we replaced massive power plants with massive amounts of tiny generators (wind, solar, water)? Who would install, build and maintain them? What would happen if we switched cars from gas to natural gas? What would happen to the money spent fighting cancer if a preventative therapy could be developed? What if we switched from batteries to capacitors?

Re: We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

#29

Post by dreamdu5t »

mdasen wrote: post #22

Do you have everything you want in life? I don't just mean, "do you have everything you want of what you could purchase with money today?" I mean everything you could want. Articles like this one make me feel like there isn't a lot left to do in the world - that we're close to stopping our progress toward better living standards. If we are stopping or slowing our progress toward higher living standards, then yes effi…

While I agree with you, history also shows that unemployment and wealth disparity often do rise high enough to cause massive civil unrest.

Yes, high unemployment isn't permanent or a long-term trend. That isn't really relevant though when you're talking about the prospect of blood in the streets prior to returning to decent levels.

The US seems completely arrogant in the sense that they don't seem to think this can happen to them, or that their military superiority somehow insulates them from civil unrest.

Re: We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

#30

Post by georgieporgie »

"Don’t fill potholes. That won’t fix the economy."

I'm not certain of the author's intent, but the one and only way that government can actually create jobs is to improve infrastructure. A better transportation network built today will have payoffs 20 years down the line. Unfortunately, it's hard to build a political career on such long-term goals.

One of my favorite Planet Money episodes deals with this: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/04/05/135151990/the-tues...

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