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9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.

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Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.

#141

Post by Uhhrrr »

gaius wrote: post #108
protomyth wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I agree about the asset part. The US just went through a "must go to college" phase that is making it difficult to do infrastructure jobs that frankly are hard to outsource. Educators and funding providers really cut anything not having to do with college prep. I wonder how many people in offices would have been happier and healthier in a vocational profession. It isn't like the money is exactly that much lower,…

With the same years experience, and putting the same hours in, I'd be earning as much as a plumber today as I am as a database administrator, I am certain of it. Maybe even more, for fewer hours. It's all about supply and demand, plumbing is something I'm sure more people could learn than could learn to be a DBA, just no-one wants to, yet we all still need our pipes seen to...

This is all very true, but you are leaving out the part about dealing with human feces.

Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.

#142

Post by gasull »

Unemployment happens because:

1. Producing in China is cheaper, so companies move production and jobs there.

2. China sells to the US while the US sells nothing to China but dollars.

3. This is possible because the US can print as many dollars as it pleases.

4. And that is possible because we left the gold standard in 1971 and unemployment has been growing since then, along with our trade and fiscal deficit.

If we had gold standard:

1. The US wouldn't print as many dollars as it pleases. and we wouldn't carry a trade deficit.

2. China wouldn't be able to sell so much to the US without buying something back.

3. Production and jobs would move back to the US because without trade imbalance it wouldn't be possible to export so much from China.

Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.

#143

Post by pushingbits »

FrojoS wrote: post #131
sixtofour wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I strongly suspect that a public health option would blow the job market wide open ..." Excellent argument for real reform to health insurance access.

Well, I learned the same logic in school. I found it compelling, too. And I guess I still do. Our teacher said: 'Because we have this safety net here in Germany, we can take more risks.' Yet, I see more risk taking in the US than in Germany. I suppose, its rather that Europeans are less risk taking, so they also support a better safety net. I know its not my business, but I can't help being scared about the idea, tha…

I think the difference is more cultural than anything. Making your own fortune is very much part of the American identity (from gold rushes to tech startups), whereas Europe has experienced over and over again that boundless ambition can lead to horrendous things (war, war, more war and genocide).

The US getting more universal health care coverage will not change that.

Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.

#144

Post by Jach »

j_baker wrote: post #27

From 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…

You might enjoy reading: http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/robotics-software/economic...

Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.

#145

Post by ldar15 »

Imagine a future society where food and shelter are essentially free. A single person can farm hectares of land and produce food for thousands. Food is distributed automatically. Shelter is built once and lasts for hundreds of years. Humans spend very little doing things they dont want to.

I have thought a lot about this. My first question was, how do we get there from here? With 9 billion people. With the poorest and least educated pumping out babies as per genetic programming. Then I had the realisation: We are already there. The problem is for those 8.9999 billion on the outside of it.

I've been looking at the poor immigrants living a few miles east, and their eight kids, and thinking that they are the problem. In fact, my two kids are just as much a part of the problem. If all of us making less than $5,000,000 p.a. would stop reproducing, we'd have our utopia in a generation.

Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.

#146

Post by ldar15 »

gasull wrote: post #142

Unemployment happens because: 1. Producing in China is cheaper, so companies move production and jobs there. 2. China sells to the US while the US sells nothing to China but dollars. 3. This is possible because the US can print as many dollars as it pleases. 4. And that is possible because we left the gold standard in 1971 and unemployment has been growing since then, along with our trade and fiscal deficit. If we ha…

It gets better.

  3. The Chinese use the money we give them to buy gvt bonds.
  4. The gvt bonds are spent by the gvt.
  5. This spending is added to GDP.
  6. GDP appears to have gone up. 
     Without gvt debt, GDP is the same it was in 1998.

Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.

#147

Post by chc »

sanderjd wrote: post #127
sixtofour wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Hey poor and struggling unemployed Americans, you need to find new skills?" Seriously, Forbes needed to run a whole article dedicated to this? That is exactly the message that the unemployed and the rest of the country need to hear and take to heart. No business should expected to take on people unskilled for a job. Some businesses will do so, to grow talent, and some of those will show an ROI, but no business sho…

The idea that business shouldn't be expected to train its workforce is intriguing to me. This seems to be an underlying assumption in our society, but I don't recall ever having heard an argument for it one way or the other. Isn't a business that refuses to provide any of the necessary education for its employees profiting from a well-educated society without pitching in anything for the bill? If all governments worl…

Businesses pay taxes and spark huge amounts of taxable activity in the course of operating — that's how they pitch in (even discounting the non-tax benefits that businesses provide to society). If society is not providing education with those tax dollars, that would be society's choice.

I can see some reasons why businesses might want to provide education (and many do in certain circumstances), but in general, I don't see why it should be more their responsibility than society's.

Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.

#148

Post by anigbrowl »

gaius wrote: post #135
anigbrowl wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I ask how old you are? Although some of your observations are correct, I distinctly remember such devaluation of the trades going on under the last conservative government as well, not just the Labour one that came to power under Blair. Indeed, worthless degrees were lovingly satirized by Douglas Adams in the Hitchhiker's Guide as far back as the 70s. To ascribe this problem solely to the faults of a single party…

I'm in my mid-30s. Sure it happened in the 80s - but i was a kid then. What was different about Nu Labour is that they sold snake oil too, a false promise of degree== job. Thatcher was heartless, but she never lied like that. She just said, get on with it.

I'm 40. My point is not that Thatcher was heartless, but that while she was busy privatizing a variety of state-owned UK companies (most of which desperately needed to be have their monopolies abolished), she also triggered a recurring asset-inflation/deflation cycle and popularized the idea of getting rich quick through trading up repeatedly. This culminated in a real-estate boom (& bust) after people were given permission to buy their council houses at rock-bottom prices.

Your spelling tics ('nu labour') and use of the suggestion that the party lied by promoting a policy of wider university education which turned out to be a failure suggest a rather intense bias. It seems not to have occurred to you that the Blair government thought widespread higher education was the antitode to Britain's structural economic problems and simply Got It Wrong. Likewise, there are a lot of people on the left who are convinced that Thatcher set out to wreck the economy by plundering the state monopolies, when the reality is that they were in terrible shape and the abrupt recession that followed a long period of financial expansion came as a nasty surprise for the then-ruling Conservatives under John Major.

I mean, it's fun to imagine that wicked politicians crash the economy for their own personal gain; but even a brief study of history suggests that wrecking an economy is usually followed by painful electoral defeat and a long term in the wilderness. Most politicians are not especially malicious, they're just not especially competent either. Gordon Brown looked like a magician until the financial crisis hit, and had probably come to believe he was. Likewise, Thatcher looked like a genius until there were riots in the streets and Sterling collapsed not long after her departure. If you can only remember the faults of the most recent government, then you're in danger of repeating the ones of that which came immediately before, or those of their predecessors.

Re: 9.2% Unemployment? Blame Microsoft.

#150

Post by thisuser »

muhfuhkuh wrote: post #54

IMO, the problem is much more than just automation and advancement in technology. It's actually far graver, and maybe inexorable at least in the short term. Hate the man or his policies (or both), but you can't deny President Obama's observation that training education is the real problem in the so-called "jobless recovery". America as it currently stands has a total, almost prideful disregard for education (public a…

Agreed. Lets also make sure that these new businesses stay employee owned. If newly created small businesses find success -- only to be bought out by the paragons of the current economic model -- we will end up cycling back into the same negative externalities of the current economic model. If they are bought out we will be back to the same unemployment level, with more public debt that was transferred to the largest corporations and their shareholders.
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