[BroJoeK]

DugwayDuke: "In 1870, 70% of the US population were farmers. In 2008, only 2%.
Should we have ‘protected’ those farming jobs?"

And that is the key point everyone needs to grasp.
Just as farming went from 90%+ of Americans in 1776 to barely 2% today, while farming production grows every year, so also US manufacturing output continues to grow while manufacturing employment declines:

Farming output increases over time:

While farming employment shrank to 2% of population:

So also manufacturing output grows:

While manufacturing employment shrinks:

Long term, we should expect that just as in agriculture, the US will produce more & more with fewer & fewer people designing, building, operating and maintaining more capable equipment.

The rest of us will work in services.

[sickoflibs]

Exactly my point on this thread.

Automation is killing US jobs.

[central_va]

That is a stupid analogy. The factories didn’t disappear, THEY WERE MOVED TO ASIA AND ELSEWHERE. The analogy falls apart immediately.

[bert]

in case some of you missed it

[bert]

——The rest of us will work in services.——

My part time retirement job is service to manufacturers

[baltimorepoet]

Its gonna be a bitch when eventually we reach the point where oil production peaks, and then enters decline. Resources aren’t infinite. We don’t grow corn, we manufacture corn using fossil-fuels. (Haber-Bosch)

Right now we are in a glut.

Should be interesting to see which wins the race, oil depletion, Mexican-overrun/Reconquista, or Muslims-in-Europe. Or China becoming dominant.

The West and its way of life is doomed. And the cute thing, trying to replace fossil-fuels with alternatives... guess what, most of those alternatives require rare earth metals. Guess which country has the most rare earth metals; yup, China. (US has like one major mine owned by Molycorp)

[IronJack]

The changes in agricultural productivity you cite caused extreme displacement in the rural areas of the country. Farms that had been owned and operated by families for generations could no longer compete with the industrial producers who controlled tens of thousands of acres, so they were forced to sell.

That worked in a lot of cases because the displaced farmers could move to industrial jobs, where the skills they'd acquired over a lifetime could be put to good use. Where are the displaced industrial workers going to go? "Services?" is a simplistic answer at best. In order to provide a service, someone has to be willing to pay for it. What are the employers of services going to use for money?

It's not that I think this requires a government solution, or even that there IS one. But any rush to embrace technological enhancements to productivity comes at a human cost. We need to anticipate that eventuality.