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This is a horrible assessment of whether we are facing technological unemployment. There are more bank tellers in the US than ever before But.. there are more

This is a horrible assessment of whether we are facing technological unemployment. There are more bank tellers in the US than ever before But.. there are more people than ever before. And the number of bank tellers is leveling off even as the population grows. Overall, there is scant evidence that we are undergoing a technological-unemployment crisis, if only because unemployment rates are low. Are you kidding me? (First, you have to always be careful with any metric where the collecting agent has even the slightest bias to the outcome. Unemployment is not the obvious number you might think it is for a variety of reasons.) Jobless and underemployment are the numbers you want to be looking at -- and good luck getting good numbers on those but when you do, I think they'll tell a very different story.

Animats 10y ago
What used to be a "bank teller" is now a sales rep, trying to sell you on loans and steer you to investments. Bank of America is rebuilding their branches into a new design. There are maybe two teller windows in the back for the occasional non-ATM cash transaction, while the front of the branch has little glassed-in sales offices like a car dealership. A lot of employment is in the marketing overhead of capitalism. There are many products, from movies to Internet access, where the marketing cost exceeds the product cost. This is zero-sum; most marketing in the US just moves demand from one product to another. (Spending is income-limited in the US; the savings rate is very low.) It's also why people are still working so hard. Marketing is inherently competitive, which means it can chew up resources out of proportion to the value produced.
- mljoe 10y ago
  Good insight, the amount of money society spends on marketing is staggering (and that's thats only things explicitly labeled as such, which I think your case is not). Actually I would go as further and say short of high IP/high technology industries, marketing (branding) IS the product. Bank of America is a fabricated brand that happens to be in banking.
- Kadin 10y ago
  One of the issues with the "new economy" / "service economy" model that has been pushed heavily over the past few decades is that it doesn't distinguish between zero-sum jobs that have as their end goal merely a reallocation of a fixed amount of resources, and jobs which create value and are basically industrial in nature but where the end product is intangible (e.g. movies, television, writing, software development, etc.). State and local governments have spent vast sums trying to attract "new economy" jobs to replace decimated primary industries, but I question how many of those jobs are marketing or "economic overhead" related. That's not to say that they're bad jobs at an individual level, or there's anything wrong with anyone working in them, but it doesn't seem like it's a sustainable basis for a national economy.

Animats 10y ago

What used to be a "bank teller" is now a sales rep, trying to sell you on loans and steer you to investments. Bank of America is rebuilding their branches into a new design. There are maybe two teller windows in the back for the occasional non-ATM cash transaction, while the front of the branch has little glassed-in sales offices like a car dealership. A lot of employment is in the marketing overhead of capitalism. There are many products, from movies to Internet access, where the marketing cost exceeds the product cost. This is zero-sum; most marketing in the US just moves demand from one product to another. (Spending is income-limited in the US; the savings rate is very low.) It's also why people are still working so hard. Marketing is inherently competitive, which means it can chew up resources out of proportion to the value produced.

mljoe 10y ago
Good insight, the amount of money society spends on marketing is staggering (and that's thats only things explicitly labeled as such, which I think your case is not). Actually I would go as further and say short of high IP/high technology industries, marketing (branding) IS the product. Bank of America is a fabricated brand that happens to be in banking.
Kadin 10y ago
One of the issues with the "new economy" / "service economy" model that has been pushed heavily over the past few decades is that it doesn't distinguish between zero-sum jobs that have as their end goal merely a reallocation of a fixed amount of resources, and jobs which create value and are basically industrial in nature but where the end product is intangible (e.g. movies, television, writing, software development, etc.). State and local governments have spent vast sums trying to attract "new economy" jobs to replace decimated primary industries, but I question how many of those jobs are marketing or "economic overhead" related. That's not to say that they're bad jobs at an individual level, or there's anything wrong with anyone working in them, but it doesn't seem like it's a sustainable basis for a national economy.