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

We only have to look at Mexican field workers crossing into the US to see this is true. Though the New York Times reported that the number of Mexicans entering the US illegally for the first time has fallen from 525,000 in 2000 to fewer than 100,000 in 2010. The ROI for working in the US is lower, given the US's economical and political environment and Mexico's improving work opportunities.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/07/06/world/america...

Wouldn't the rational decision for this scenario be to participate in the credit bubble and use the money to buy food storage and become more self-reliant?

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 United States has a big disadvantage compared with Germany in this respect. German manufacturers receive government subsidies, and there are investment incentives. In the US, the tax incentives encourage offshoring production. Labor unions sit on the board of directors of German manufacturing firms. Unlike the US, labor has a voice at the table in Germany.

Japan also has an industrial policy, with significant government subsidies to support targeted niches. Japan's Ministry of Finance engages in vigorous exchange rate intervention to keep the Yen undervalued (read: mercantilism, similar to China's currency policy). China has extensive subsidies: cheap land, tax holidays and cheap government financing. It does have environmental regulations--but China doesn't enforce them. Multinationals can pollute with abandon in China--and the subsidy that they receive is someone else's negative externality. This is hardly the level playing field that underlies any reasonable interpretation of free-trade policy.

These realities stand in stark contrast to Ricardo's classical notion of comparative advantage, the heart of which involves full employment. A true reckoning of comparative advantage should include the impact of negative externalities.

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, too, to Clay Shirky's cognitive surplus. In the comments on this post at Google+, Eric Reasons brought up entertainment as an example. They get a double whammy. The people formerly known as the audience (TM Jay Rosen) now have more ways to entertain/distract themselves and can "consume" less entertainment. They also can make more entertainment, ending the scarcity and providing no end of free competition to the industry. There will be much more entertainment, but fewer jobs from it.

Look at retail. Practical necessity required there to be brick-and-mortar stores with much inventory and sales staff across the country as a channel of fulfillment. No more. RIP Borders. Now it is much more efficient, of course, to consolidate and fulfill commodity goods at a distance. Thank you, Amazon. Again, fewer jobs, which won't be replaced.

Transparent pricing in the market will lower prices and reduce the ability of retailers to benefit from pricing opacity. More efficiency. Less profit. Fewer jobs.

Even in my "trade," education, we know what's coming: open courseware will replace third-rate lectures.

Yes, I'm well aware that say, in the shift from agrarian to industrial economies, efficiency shifted jobs from farms (greater efficiency) to factories (greater wealth). The factory equivalents today -- startups -- create great wealth but with fewer jobs.

I say none of this to criticize technology. It's just reality. I will argue as I explore this topic that we must look at policy alternatives for more investment in entrepreneurial ventures and education (of both youth and displaced workers).

It make sense on the long run, think about it, technology introduced new jobs to offset the ones it killed

But as we get better doing what we do, as we become more efficient we need less people to do a particular job.

Now without new types of Jobs being created by new technology, efficiency can net kill jobs

Another point to consider is that other factors are surely at play that accelerated the net killing of job, such as outsourcing and so on (outsourcing of course, is make available because of advancement in IT and communication)