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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

#181

Post by prodigal_erik »

jgmmo wrote: post #96

This is a classic economic fallacy. Invention of the plow improved efficiency and killed jobs, invention of the sewing machine improved efficiency and killed jobs, invention of the computer improved efficiency and killed jobs. They killed jobs in the short run but they made everyone in society better off on the whole. Sure, some workers had to be retrained -- and some workers could never find a job again. However suc…

I agree it's a long-term improvement, but if "some workers could never find a job again" happens to the majority all at once, they aren't going to quietly starve.

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

#182

Post by cma »

Eliezer wrote: post #71
pg wrote: post #24

"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?

PG, what probability would you assign to the propositions "This time things are different" (empirically: the jobs won't come back 5 years from now) vs. "This time things are not different" (empirically: the jobs will come back 5 years from now)? Warning, if your probabilities are extreme enough, someone might want to bet you on it. Presuming things are different, I see five obvious answers to the original question (a…

There will always be plenty of jobs:

http://books.google.com/books?id=ErEXMCudMZ4C&lpg=PA77&#...

If we run out of jobs, people will start wearing coats made of auditable solved captchas or something, just to prove that they commanded more human labor than the next guy.

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

#183

Post by samstave »

pg wrote: post #24

"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?

I think the difference is that technology, now, allows for far better distribution of effort around the globe. Previously, as you mention, technology was uplifting silo'd productivity - but was not allowing for whole industries to be either globally distributed (information based industries) or remotely centralized (agriculture exports).

We now have sufficient technology in all areas to allow for both; the global distribution of knowledge working, sufficient advancements in production technology to increase output efficiencies in specific areas that centralization of output for the global economy can occur (e.g. agri output from say brazil supporting a large % of global soybean consumption - and manifacturing in China supporting a large % of global doohickey consumption)

We are reaching a change in the overall model of economies, where previously each nation was duplicating a large portion of the industries as their production was only enough for internal consumption.

If you look at the entire planet as a single resource zone, then naturally you will have uneven distribution of resources, production, knowledge, etc... thus uneven distribution of labor to support this.

If we could see a heat map of the globe's resources to people to markets to [name a factor]... etc. but weighted by their pull in each direction, then maybe we could better model how the global economy really looks.

Extra Credit: weight the flow of this map to energy dependence and you'll really see how fragile this little world is.

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

#184

Post by illumen »

achompas wrote: post #133
entangld wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't a very large proportion of American labor unskilled? Real unemployment is always worse than the figure they give (when you account for people who stopped looking).

I can't say how many workers have less than a HS degree. A trip to bls.gov would help, but I'm on an iPhone. I imagine the majority of American workers have a HS degree, at least.

There's no such thing as a HS degree. There is such a thing as a high school diploma.

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

#185

Post by randomdata »

troystribling wrote: post #136
pg wrote: post #24

"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?

You could argue that in the skill level required to transition from destroyed jobs to created has changed. When the economy transitioned from farming to manufacturing a farmer could begin working in a factory with little training. Now automation is beginning to eliminate jobs at some skill levels. For these displaced workers to find new jobs years of training could be required. If the rate that jobs are being elimina…

> For these displaced workers to find new jobs years of training could be required.

I think we vastly overstate the importance of training.

Being a farmer, I enjoy following farm-related discussions. Farmers spend just as much time talking about the shortage of talent as tech companies do, if not more. What is interesting about farms is that the job needs to be done in a timely manner no matter what, so you have to hire the best you can, and hope they become good at the job eventually.

Being a software developer, I also enjoy following tech-related discussions. We read story after story of people going from absolutely no experience to profitable software company in weeks, yet we still believe that years and years of training are required to work on even the simplest of projects.

Tech companies come with the luxury of artificial timelines. A tech company can leave a position unfilled for months or even years without any significant impact to the bottom line. Your software codebase isn't going to shrivel up and die or your warehouse of stock isn't going to expire if it takes an additional month or two to complete a feature.

There is no reason why anyone with a few days of studying software development cannot join the team. We just don't need them. We can wait and hire the guy who scaled out Facebook and developed Watson while working on iOS on the side. That is the shift in employment we are seeing and no amount of training is going to resolve the underlying problem.

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

#186

Post by viandante »

I think you guys are missing the point. The point is not that people are jobless, the point is that what they would get paid if they worked is just too low for a decent life.

At the correct price (even 1 cent per hr), everybody gets a job fast.

Given that, the real problem is for the jobless to learn something of more value to the economy or accept lower salaries, it is not technology. If there was no technology development, things will be more expensive and the poor would be even more poor.

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

#187

Post by watmough »

lionhearted wrote: post #149
Eliezer wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PG, what probability would you assign to the propositions "This time things are different" (empirically: the jobs won't come back 5 years from now) vs. "This time things are not different" (empirically: the jobs will come back 5 years from now)? Warning, if your probabilities are extreme enough, someone might want to bet you on it. Presuming things are different, I see five obvious answers to the original question (a…

> PG, what probability would you assign to the propositions "This time things are different" (empirically: the jobs won't come back 5 years from now) vs. "This time things are not different" (empirically: the jobs will come back 5 years from now)? Warning, if your probabilities are extreme enough, someone might want to bet you on it. What odds would you bet on? I'll lay you 10:1 that world GDP continues to trend up b…

I'll take your bet, but you might want to look at this chart before you hand me your money.

http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&#...

And this one.

http://wastedenergy.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/20080301worl...

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

#189

Post by com »

ChristianMarks wrote: post #166
ww520 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am curious. How does Germany do it? It has high labor cost yet it maintains its manufacture leadership and has export surplus. China and Germany become manufacture powerhouses yet have vast difference in labor cost structure.

Germany and Japan pursue their own national industrial policies--unlike the United States, which doesn't really have one. The industrial policy of Germany and Japan is to compete in high-value, highly specialized niches, where there are few competitors. This way they maintain high profit margins to support middle class wages at home. Germany's exporters get rebates on the VAT taxes of the goods they export. The Unite…

Can you find references for these German government subsidies for exporters and their percentage value per exported unit?

The US also runs a very complex series of industrial subsidies too, but it seems to be somewhat ad-hoc and therefore difficult (outside of WTO complaints such as Boeing-Airbus) to explore.

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

#190

Post by chipsy »

jeffjarvis wrote: post #168
pg wrote: post #24

"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?

Jarvis here.... (that's my quote).... I'm not sure; that's what I want to explore. But I think the scale enabled by the net creates such profound efficiency and disintermediation. craig newmark sees himself as a philanthropist of classifieds; his (estimated) $100m business helped disrupt more than $13b in classified revenue. The funds are a dividend for the transactors so the value is not gone, but jobs are. Look, to…

You reminded me of an interesting thought. The industrial revolution involved advances in information only incrementally; we went from letter-writing to (eventually) phone and television. The new mediums were very unambiguously new platforms each time.

But now we have a set of platforms(computers themselves, the operating systems, the networks, etc.) for all digitally encodable forms of information. We keep building new platforms on top of these systems; and the rate at which the platforms appear is increasing; 10 years ago you could not do the kinds of trivially focused apps that have become today's cliche.

This is a point of fundamental difference from productivity advancements in the industrial era; better machines meant more resources mined, more goods finished and delivered. And communication remained expensive throughout that period; I can recall long-distance calls still being relatively costly in my childhood(80s, early 90s).

In contrast, better information implies doing more with less, in the physical sense of time and effort. Taken to its literal extreme we have Twitter as an example - a broadcasting medium without the formality and overhead of TV or radio.

And if our advancements from here on out are mostly based on doing "less" and not "more" physically, the whole way in which our economy is measured today is going to become increasingly wrong.

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