Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

buzzmachine.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 270 posts

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

#81

Post by sachinag »

achompas wrote: post #64
msluyter wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One answer, and I don't know if this is the right answer, is that unlike in previous revolutions, a new class of jobs has not been created to (fully) replace the jobs that are being displaced. In the industrial revolution, farmers could move to the city and get a job in the factory. In the (first) information revolution, factory workers could become telephone operators. But as Tyler Cowen notes in "The Great Stagnati…

IAAE, so I'll address this: jobs are not being "displaced" or permanently "eliminated" right now. There's a simple, plausible explanation for all of this: 1. Businesses are hesitant to invest in capital. 2. The housing market is terrible right now--especially housing starts. 3. Jobs related to #2 and #3 generally go to lower-skilled workers. They're the ones who are struggling right now (with something like 16% unemp…

It would improve faster if your bosses would engage in QE3 and started to inflate the economy. [Edit: that's an attack on the Board of Governors, certainly not you.]

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

#82

Post by defen »

cjy wrote: post #27
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 wh…

> 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.

Rather than ascribe sinister motives to a person (a desire to oppress Chinese/Indian workers in order to keep American salaries high), maybe you could consider the structural problems that make it difficult for American workers to compete with foreign ones. OSHA regulations, Social Security, Medicare, health insurance, unions, and many other factors go into the cost of an American worker. I don't know much about China or India but I doubt they have any of these things. So, are they important? If they are, why are we ok with importing goods made by people without the same protections, in order to save a few bucks? If they're not important, maybe we should eliminate them, so we can compete in the global marketplace.

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

#83

Post by waterside81 »

ikarous wrote: post #6

Plenty of others have predicted the rise of unemployment in proportion to increased automation, and they've been wrong before. Maybe this time they'll be right. I don't know; I'm not economist nor do I possess a crystal ball. What I do know is that this whole situation is terribly discouraging for young people fresh out of school. My partner, for instance, recently graduated with a degree in civil engineering from a…

From your other responses, it looks like you're American? If you're willing to move up to communist Canada (I kid, I kid), we're starving for engineers. Alberta needs civil engineers for their oil industry, and Ontario & the City of Toronto are hiring too.

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

#84

Post by rdouble »

ikarous wrote: post #6

Plenty of others have predicted the rise of unemployment in proportion to increased automation, and they've been wrong before. Maybe this time they'll be right. I don't know; I'm not economist nor do I possess a crystal ball. What I do know is that this whole situation is terribly discouraging for young people fresh out of school. My partner, for instance, recently graduated with a degree in civil engineering from a…

There are civil engineering jobs in places you probably don't want to go, like western North Dakota.

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

#85

Post by xal »

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?

Read "lights in the tunnel" by Martin Ford.

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

#86

Post by alphaBetaGamma »

The lack of pickup in employment numbers is not surprising when viewed in an historical context.

There is very broad historical overview of sovereign crisis in “This Time Is Different”, by Reinhart and Rogoff, which also includes banking crisis. Looking at what I can find on Google books (I don’t have the book here), we have that historically the unemployment rate rises an average of %7 and that this lasts 4 years. Output falls more than 9 percent, but that down turn only lasts 2 years. So yes, a jobless recovery is what we should expect.

From their summary on pp. 224 [1] that on average:

- Housing prices decline %35 over 6 years. - Equity collapses %56 over about 3.5 years - Unemployment rises %7; down phases lasts 4 years - Output falls %9, downturn lasts 2 years. - Government debt rises %86. The main cause is not the bailout but from the collapse in tax revenues. - Frequent spike in government borrowing rates.

So I would say we are not living anything unexpected.

[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=Iihe6s0XincC&lpg=PP1&#3...

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

#87

Post by antidaily »

I can't help but wonder what our unemployment numbers would look like without housing crisis and the two wars. Would we be investing in things like energy, healthcare, and tech? People are sitting on cash because of uncertainties in the markets, not because tech killed all the jobs.

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

#88

Post by sshumaker »

The middle class is going away. And not coming back. All of those factory and middle management jobs are being replaced by cheaper labor in the one case (offshore or robotics) or by technological and communication efficiencies on the other.

A prediction: Twenty years from now, there will only be two types of jobs in the United States: Creatives and those in the Service Industry.

Creatives - anyone who creates things with their mind. Artists, yes, but also programmers, designers (graphic/web/product), musicians, directors, etc. The US won't necessarily have a monopoly in this department, but there's enough cultural barriers in many of these fields that it's likely we'll still have a very healthy presence there, at least for selling to the Western world.

Everyone else will be in the service industry - and I'm referring to service jobs that cannot be outsourced, because they require someone local. Waiters, barbers, chefs, trainers, couriers. Nurses and caregivers. And lots of service jobs that don't exist today. Need someone to help assemble the product you just downloaded and 3d printed?

The only jobs that will remain are the ones that we can't outsource to robots or cheap labor.

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

#89

Post by chefsurfing »

In my opinion John Michael Greer's "The Long Descent" is the most realistic and most hopeful take on this vein of thinking and writing. It is also a well-written and easy to read book. The main takeaway is that our situation is not a problem with a solution, but rather a predicament or situation with various coping mechanisms.

http://www.newsociety.com/Books/L/The-Long-Descent

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

#90

Post by tsotha »

ajross wrote: post #50
tsotha wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what's the big technological difference between this year and, say, four years ago? Why was unemployment below 5% then?

There was a speculative bubble in the world real estate market. This led to a lot of real cash circulating (e.g. people refinancing to pay for kitchen remodels so that they can flip their home). That popped, and all the excess economic activity disappeared with it. The article posits a broad trend. Short term boom and bust fluctuations will always happen.

The article posits a broad trend for which it provides no evidence, and indeed nobody has been able to provide evidence. This is the broad trend people have been positing since the ludites were smashing those newfangled automated looms.
Post reply on HN