91–100 of 265 posts
The memory is that these old factory/manufacturing jobs were high paying (middle class), secure, and accessible to people of low intellect, minimal education, and limited social grace. The proposed replacements "caregivers, retail workers and customer-service representatives" are significantly lower wage and also require more "EQ" that the working man of the prior generation didn't need. The voters these politicians…
Andy Grove spent the last decade or so of his life crusading about this. He framed the problem as, Silicon Valley invests a great deal in creating innovation, but outsources the scaling of it. Even though that may be in the short term best interests of the companies doing the outsourcing, both they and the country lose out on the economic growth, jobs, and crucial institutional knowledge that scaling innovations brin…
I wasn't aware of these facts: -- [T]here can be no revival of American manufacturing, because there has been no collapse. Because of automation, there are far fewer jobs in factories. But the value of stuff made in America reached a record high in the first quarter of 2016, even after adjusting for inflation. -- [T]here were 64,000 steelworkers in America last year, and 820,000 home health aides.... Soon, we will be…
Here's the US table of employment by category.[1] (I keep mentioning this table in discussions of employment.) 14% of the workforce makes all the stuff. That's manufacturing, mining, construction, and agriculture. 14%. US manufacturing employment peaked in 1979. Manufacturing output is at peak now. That 14% number was about 50% in 1950, and maybe 90% in 1900. That's how much things have changed. As for imports, China…
According to " rel="nofollow">https://www.minnpost.com/macro-micro-minnesota/2012/02/histo..., manufacturing employment peaked at about 35% in 1950s. In 1900, it was around 25%, with services about 33% and the rest in agriculture. That graph has services employment always outpacing manufacturing (which meshes with my knowledge of US history) and manufacturing only outpacing agriculture around the 1910s, 1920s (which also meshes with my knowledge of US history--agriculture was very labor intensive prior to mechanization).
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Not sure why this is being down-voted: it's pretty well established that service economies have limited potential to export or achieve economies of scale, and thus unable to benefit from expanding global trade.
The plus side of service economies is that they're a lot harder to outsource - you can't open a Manilla call-center to handle a nursing home.
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But there aren't a finite number of factories. If more factory work gets automated, then it will reduce the cost of building more factories and producing even more goods. Whereas service jobs seem more finite. There is only a finite demand for burgers or shelf stockers, unless you increase the population. I really don't understand how a mostly service based economy is sustainable. In any case, the service based jobs…
There's a finite demand for manufactured goods too. If anything, the price elasticity for manufactured goods seems likely to be lesser than that for restaurant meals; I'd eat out more often if it cost less, but I'm not going to buy additional dishwashers or dining tables for my house no matter how cheap they get. I'm not going to buy light bulbs or printers faster than they need replacement due to failure. With laser…
I'm not sure the quantity of goods is limited either. Looking at a supermarket today, the diversity of goods for so many niche purposes is incredible. And the internet has increased it an order of magnitude more.
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Manufacturing also provides jobs for both high and low skill workers. As such can be seen as more valuable to a community than say, a software company that only hires engineers and a CS center in a different state. Manufacturing was one of the best roads for a low skill worker to earn good money and move up the rung economically - something that only seems to be getting harder as time goes on.
It may seem to be getting harder, but in reality it's not. Rank based measures of mobility are stable. Since income inequality is up, absolute mobility has also increased. https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/chettyetalAERPP2014.pdf
"Based on all of these measures, we find that children entering the labor market today have the same chances of moving up in the income distribution (relative to their parents) as children born in the 1970s.
"Although these rank-based measures of mobility have remained stable, income inequality increased over time in our sample, consistent with prior work. Hence, the consequences of the "birth lottery"---the parents to whom a child is born---are larger today than in the past. A useful visual analogy is to envision the income distribution as a ladder, with each percentile representing a different rung. The rungs of the ladder have grown further apart (inequality has increased), but children’s chances of climbing from lower to higher rungs have not changed (rank-based mobility has remained stable).
...
"Together, these two facts can be used to construct various measures of mobility. For example, if one defines mobility based on relative positions in the income distribution---e.g., a child’s prospects of rising from the bottom to the top quintile---then intergenerational mobility has remained unchanged in recent decades. If instead one defines mobility based on the probability that a child from a low-income family (e.g., the bottom 20 percent) reaches a fixed upper-income threshold (e.g., $100,000), then mobility has increased because of the increase in inequality. However, the increase in inequality has also magnified the difference in expected incomes between children born to low- (e.g., bottom-quintile) versus high- (top-quintile) income families. In this sense, mobility has fallen because a child’s income depends more heavily on her parents’ position in the income distribution today than in the past."
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I think the upper bound on manufacturing jobs would be the cost of automation.
Automation isn't the enemy of manufacturing these days as much as decentralized manufacturing is. Once 3D printing evolves to the point of being suitable to print everyday items it would kill a lot of jobs all across the supply chain the manufacturing industry.
That won't happen any time soon. Sure, you can print household items like a cup, plate, and possibly silverware but so many household things are made out of materials that aren't really 'printable' (a pillow or couch for example) or complicated devices with components (headphones, a can of air freshener, a laptop), manufacturing plays a role in all of those items.
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"When compared to 24 middle-income and high income countries, the U.S. ranks 16th in the amount of inter-generational earnings mobility. The relatively low level of mobility in the U.S. may arise in part because low-income children in the U.S. tend to have less stable and lower-income families, less secure families, and parents who have less time to devote to their children." http://inequality.stanford.edu/sites/defa…
The numbers you quote do not address the point under discussion at all.
Since the appropriate definition of inter-generational mobility depends upon one’s normative objective, we characterize the copula and marginal distributions separately in this paper."
It would appear we have different normative objectives.
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> actively resisted it Honest question. Is this a reality or a degrading stereotype?
Yes, it is real. I'm from a small town in Montana with a strong timber industry presence, and loads of people stick around, largely because their parents want them to stay or because they don't want to leave everything they know. Often times, there's no choice because the kids didn't do well enough to go to "coastal school," nor could they or their parents afford it if they did. People from cities exhibit this kind o…
We've really fallen as Americans, too eager to stick in one place. 2-3 generations ago many of our ancestors left everything they had in their home country to come here with nothing more than the money in their pockets and shirt on their back.
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The entire comment is an absurd stereotype, and about what you'd expect to find in this forum. Manufacturing jobs weren't (and aren't) filled with a bunch of meatheads coloring by numbers any more than are construction jobs.
>Manufacturing jobs weren't (and aren't) filled with a bunch of meatheads coloring by numbers any more than are construction jobs. This is true, but the fact that there are definitely stigmas around higher education in underprivileged and working class communities in the USA is very much a reality.