Posted on 01/23/2013 7:02:56 AM PST by george76
Five years after the start of the Great Recession, the toll is terrifyingly clear: Millions of middle-class jobs have been lost in developed countries the world over. And the situation is even worse than it appears.
Most of the jobs will never return, and millions more are likely to vanish as well, say experts who study the labor market. What's more, these jobs aren't just being lost to China and other developing countries, and they aren't just factory work. Increasingly, jobs are disappearing in the service sector, home to two-thirds of all workers
...
this "hollowing out" of the middle-class workforce is far from over.
(Excerpt) Read more at nbc40.net ...
I think red states should take the lead on this issue, it is easily a winnable issue for us.
I agree with you both that Obama and his job/country killing policies are first and foremost the reason for what is going on. The automation/technology issue throws salt on the wounds ... but Obama is responsible for the wound (near fatal if not fatal) in the first place.
Technological advances do NOT eliminate jobs, they create a whole new universe of employment opportunities in their wake.
There is a short-term displacement while one income-producing task set is replaced by another, and a sometimes steep learning curve until the new tasks are put on a paying basis.
Face it, most task sets are boring as hell, and in actuality, most people now engaged in this mind-numbing activity would be GLAD to leave that sort of ennui for a more exciting interaction with their environment. Thus the popularity of computer gaming. Unfortunately, a lot of that comes on company time, and eventually leads to dismissal.
“Denying the role of computers in improving efficiency is foolish.”
Agree, in fact Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce should be credited as the two most significant people in changing our economy from heavy industry to high tech/information based. Additionally, these two men should be credit with having the most influence in bringing women into high paying technical and managerial positions, much more than any so called women’s advocacy groups or people have done.
There was some rather “simplistic” thinking when the article explained how jobs are being “stolen” through technology. For instance, it said if you buy something on line, you’ve eliminated the need for a salesperson.
I work for an online retailer. We still have salespeople to talk to customers about products, but many of our orders do come in from people ordering online with no assistance. But online ordering creates a whole other subset of jobs.
To maintain a website, you need webmasters, and programmers. Marketing folk to manage online advertising.
In a traditional store, you didn’t have folks constantly shipping product. Plus an online retailer works shifts practically round the clock, instead of a tradition 9 to 9 work day. So more shifts mean more people employed.
Nor do you employ people to deal with product technical questions (in a traditional store the salesperson would do all of those things) but online retail moves so fast, you have to have different folks doing each of these jobs simultaneously.
Then there are the warranty and return employees who just deal with those customer service type of jobs or tracking orders for customers.
In the online sales business, I see many more jobs being created than in a “brick and mortar” store. And many of the brick and mortars also run a website to be competitive, so they’re hiring many more folks than if they were just brick and mortar (Walmart, prime example. $45 order gets you free shipping of their product to your house...and our orders usually arrive within 2 or 3 days...so no more trips to Walmart anymore for things we usually buy there.)
It just seems the author didn’t completely think through the jobs that technology creates in some industries.
...like the car replaced the horse? We need to bring back blacksmiths!!!
I wouldn’t worry too much :) The “self driving car” is still a long way from being viable (think lawsuits). When you see these demonstrations, remember, they’re just “demos”. They’re also often conducted in California, where the roads are great and the sky is usually clear. Now think of a Michigan winter; construction, potholes, snow, ice, etc. - I can barely see the lanes or figure out what I’m supposed to do sometimes. When a car can figure all that out - AND NEVER GET IT WRONG - then we’ll have something, my guess is that such a feature will need to be turned off half the time.
Remember the Prius accelerator issue? Now multiply that x1000 (in terms of technical issues) and consider the lawsuits the instant that somebody “thinks” the car was to blame. Good luck with that.
Having worked in IT at a number of companies for entirely too darn long, I can attest to the fact that business conversations have changed from "How do we improve the business?" to "How do we avoid this stupid regulation?".
The problem has accelerated rapidly over the past 5-6 years. This situation can't end well.
I think they will be here far faster than you think, and the snow states will get them first. Scanners for these cars can work in frequencies where water, snow, and dust are simply transparent. The sensors will see as well in a whiteout blizzard as on a sunny day. As for liability, I used to think that too, but it depends on who accepts the liability. If a trucking company is not liable for software mistakes, but is liable for a human driver's mistakes, then we will see a very rapid transition.
Both the development of self driving cars, and the cars themselves, will operate like a swarm. they can drive hundereds of cars at a time, and software learn from all of them in parallel. This cuts development time.
When they operate, they will act as a swarm as well, communicating with each other about road hazards they encounter . An individual driver will not have the amount of information the self driving cars will have.
There is no law of physics which guarantees that for every job lost due to technical innovation, another job will open up, if that person retrains themselves. This is especially true when the government is taking steps to stifle job growth across the whole economy. The innovations I am interested in will considerably disrupt the workforce in a stagnant economy like ours.
It’s globalism. That is the disasterous economic policy that is crashing the middle class in the West and it’s the same in both parties.
It’s hard to comepte with the slaves of China and India unless we become cheaper slaves than they are. Our elite set out with the purpose of bringing poor third world nations into our education, technology and wealth. They knew they were crashing us to do it. It’s been an exercise in global wealth and power transfer.
Economic globalism has been a disaster for the US. Cultural globalism is a disaster for the globe. Western Globalists are treasonous, greedy blind men and “we are the world” idealists.
Killing our constitutional freedom and Europe’s freedom is one of the necessities for globalism to “progress.” We can’t be free and economically strapped to the guarenteed poverty of globalism.
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