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Interesting that none of these articles ever address the root causes of structural unemployment. Globalization combined with rapidly advancing technology are al

• DevX101 15y ago
  You're absolutely right. And I think the reason people don't talk directly about the issue enough, is because we really don't know what to do about it. There are many jobs that are now obsolete, or will be due to technological progress. Not only are many 'labor' jobs being rendered obsolete, but so are many 'mundane' white collar jobs. Toll-booth operators are obsolete (or will be) Bookkeepers are obsolete (or will be) Many back-office support-services can be automated or re-located All cashiers could potentially be made obsolete Many retail sales could be made obsolete (as people shop online) Where do all these people go? During the last technological revolution, there was a relatively smooth transition from farming to manufacturing. But I honestly don't see how large swathes of the population that don't have specialized skills will fit in in the new economy. Most of the people reading this comment will do just fine. But we face the really tough questions when dealing with the increasingly large number of people who don't have skills that are in the demand. And even if they all got the skills, employers simply wouldn't need all of them as labor becomes increasingly leveraged. A couple professors fro MIT just wrote an e-book called 'Race Against the Machine' discussing this phenomena. http://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-Machine-Accelerating-ebook/dp/B005WTR4ZI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1320497913&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-Machine-Accelerating-eboo...
  • mseebach 15y ago
    > During the last technological revolution, there was a relatively smooth transition from farming to manufacturing. Relative to what, exactly? That transition was only smooth in retrospective. It took many decades and (among other things) spawned a major political ideology and a superpower based on it dominating a century.
  • WildUtah 15y ago
    Most of the manufacturing jobs are already gone -- even as manufacturing production rises -- and yet just a few years ago in the developed world nearly everyone who wanted to work could find a job. In fact, developed nations in Europe and the Americas are importing vast numbers of low wage workers to do low value per hour jobs where humans are still better than machines. It continues in the face of a prolonged severe recession. So the emerging problem of no available work to do does not seem to be materializing. In fact, it's hard to imagine. Does every public park and private garden in your city look as clean, inviting, and pretty as it could possibly be? Is every street paved smooth without cracks and potholes? Does a bumper crop of fruit never go bad for lack of harvesters? Is every home clean and freshly scrubbed all the time and is a freshly cooked meal always waiting? Does every corner have a crossing guard during school hours? There's a lot of intellectually undemanding work to be done in a utopia if we want to pay for it. Right now, we import foreign workers to do cheap labor but we could take unemployed citizens and subsidize their wages to have our own do those jobs instead. The unemployed citizens are living on private or public welfare and social insurance today but they could be working. We could kick in public money to make it possible to pay a legal wage with benefits for the jobs undocumented workers do and the employers would prefer to stay legal by hiring citizens. We could even document the undocumented and add enough subsidies to employ them too. Economic change driving social change is disruptive. But let's remember that technological productivity is a positive change that makes us wealthier. Unemployment that follows from energy shortages or global climate change, if those ever get serious, would be a much bigger worry.
    • dquigley 15y ago
      An interesting idea, but do you think many American citizens would take these jobs, even with subsidized wages? I personally don't think they would, but I'd be interested to hear what others think.
• ianhawes 15y ago
  That is an economic fallacy. http://www.fee.org/library/books/economics-in-one-lesson/#0.1_L8 http://www.fee.org/library/books/economics-in-one-lesson/#0.... Please read that. It is a 40's era book that disputes several economic fallacys, specifically the "Curse of the Machine".
  • FD3SA 15y ago
    Indeed. I am quite familiar with the Luddite fallacy. Unfortunately, it is predicated upon two assumptions:(1) humans are infinitely capable and re-trainable, and (2) technology creates more jobs than it automates. Both of these assumptions are quite untenable given our understanding of human biology and technological progress.
    • skylan_q 15y ago
      If we have reached the point where 2) is true, then there is no more work to do and everything is done! :D
      • Cushman 15y ago
        And in a world where you need a job to have food, we all starve to death.
      • steins 15y ago
        re. Cushman: Or maybe some people can move to farms, supplying more farm labor, sending farm worker wages down, and lowering the price of food to close to nothing? Ohh wait... minimum wage laws stop that from happening.
  • exit 15y ago
    being a 40's era book is not a selling point
    • skylan_q 15y ago
      The point is that this kind of stuff was debunked 70+ years ago. (Actually, you can go back to Bastiat with "The seen and unseen") We keep falling for the same mistakes. It makes me wonder why people hold their convictions for their theories of economics so strongly as opposed to, say, the theory that the speed of light can't be surpassed. If we can approach physics with humility and admit ignorance until further study, why do people not adopt this attitude with things like economics? :(
• mseebach 15y ago
  So we've passed "peak jobs"? Did you see that thing the other day where some people decided to make an entire music video in stop motion using Jelly Beans[1]? It took 30 persons 22 months. That is possible because "globalization combined with rapidly advancing technology" can drastically lower the amount of economic output each person needs to produce to sustain him or herself. This also means that a person who is capable of filling an entire day with production of economic output has a drastically higher amount of wealth to spend on things not specifically "necessary" - such as feeding people making stop motion Jelly Beans films. 1: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3193914 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3193914
  • sunsu 15y ago
    I understand your point, but the documentary video said that most of the 30 people were volunteers.
    • mseebach 15y ago
      Yes, I took some rhetorical liberty in that last point. But even so, the fact that they are volunteers matter less that you seem to suggest: their rent and groceries were still paid for. Wether that came from parents, other benefactors or part time work or savings (being their own benefactors), the fact that they were at liberty to do what they did is a product of the changes we're seeing.
      • DannoHung 15y ago
        Or they did it as a hobby in their spare time?
        • mseebach 15y ago
          "Spare time" is time that is left over when you've done the things you need to do. The existence of spare time is evidence that your productivity is higher than your consumption.
  • lukifer 15y ago
• madamepsychosis 15y ago
  Maybe there's another cause: a huge mismatch between the skills needed and the skills provided by schools. Schools were designed for the industrial era, not the post-industrial era etc. etc. etc....
• rudiger 15y ago
  Literally millions of Chinese workers at Foxconn and other companies are supplying the world with iPhones. It's not just Apple with its thousands of employees making and selling these phones.
  • DasIch 15y ago
    This example would be much more convincing if Foxconn wouldn't work on replacing millions of Chinese workers with robots.
    • deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    • beachgeek 15y ago
      Well even robots need some form of human supervision. I remember reading a comment from Steve Jobs to Obama that he would never build a factory in the US due to overly burdensome regulations and the like. When the dollar started collapsing around 2008, I asked some friends who ran operations for the big manufacturing companies as to why they wouldn't bring the jobs back stateside. It made intuitive sense to me: wages rising in China, cheaper dollar, higher fuel costs. Not to mention its always harder to run things when your employees are half a world away. The universal reaction was no way they'd bring manufacturing jobs back. Reasons: 1. Don't want to deal with unions. 2. Don't want to deal with hidden costs like healthcare etc. 3. Too many regulations. 4. Just too hard to scale up or down. Apparently in China if you need to scale up your factory, you send a bus into the countryside to pick up villagers. Train them for 3 weeks and bam you have a factory worker. Who's living in your factory dorm, so they're available for over-time etc. It sounded insane actually, I can't imagine any normal person wanting to work like this. But its great if you are running a factory.
• rayiner 15y ago
  I'm skeptical of that argument. Historically when technology has advanced, it has created new roles for people whose jobs were obsoleted. Why is now the time when the majority of the population becomes too dumb to cut it in the "new economy?" Especially when technology acts as a multiplying effect for what someone without specialized education can do? Generally, depressed wages (i.e.: decreased price of labor) should drive up demand. If that doesn't happen, that means there is a bottleneck somewhere else. I think a key observation missing in all of these analyses is the most obvious one: that bottleneck is energy. What's different between 1995 and today? Well a barrel of oil cost about $25 2010 dollars back then, and costs almost $100 dollars now. We have an economy that is entirely driven by oil. When the cost of that goes up, because we've run out of the easy-to-reach stuff and have moved to expensive and difficult methods, then it's no surprise that the economic equilibrium shifts to a point with lower activity.
  • streptomycin 15y ago
    > Why is now the time when the majority of the population becomes too dumb to cut it in the "new economy?" http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2010/08/08/unemployed-21st-century-draft-horse/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2010/08/08/unemployed-21s...
  • Cushman 15y ago
    The price of oil is not determined by the cost of extracting oil. Prices are going up because of speculation.
    • hyperbovine 15y ago
      Wha? The price of oil is going up because there are billions of new consumers of petroleum on the world stage. Speculation has caused prices to spike in recent years, but you'd be crazy to think that we'll ever see $1 gas again.
      • Cushman 15y ago
        There are billions of new consumers of everything, but the price of cars/computers/milk hasn't quadrupled in the last twenty years.
• philwelch 15y ago
  Not quite. We are seeing massive shortages of workers at global extremes, but an oversupply in the middle. We have too few engineers, but not enough unemployed Americans are retrainable, numerate, and intelligent enough to fill that gap. We also have too few apple pickers, but not enough unemployed Americans are willing and able to perform that kind of manual labor. It's the comfortable but not intellectually difficult jobs that are in short supply.
• danmaz74 15y ago
  What are you talking about? Do you think that Apple's iphones are produced by Apple's 50k employees? Apple isn't really a manufacturing company anymore, it is an engineering/design/marketing/retail company. But to manufacture Apple iphones, Apple Asian suppliers employ hundreds of thousands of people. What you describe is much more an effect on the developed work of the migration of manufacturing jobs to emergent economies than that of technology, which, on the contrary, helps the developed world itself to slow down the loss of manufacturing jobs through higher worked hour productivity.
• lkrubner 15y ago
  You are in danger of making the Lump Of Labor Fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy You are looking backwards. That is your first mistake. If you only look at what jobs exist now, then you are forced to look backwards and everything looks dark. Try to imagine what the future might actually be like. Let's take a hypothetical example of some future industry: It is well know that by the year 2050, the urrgh industry was central to the USA economy. Conceptually, the idea of urrghs was developed by Lisa Simon Beckworth of MIT, late in 2014. Michael Ardossa of Stanford developed the first working urrgh in the summer of 2016. However, urrghs remained an academic toy until 2019, when Herbert Boink of Cambridge developed a technique for mass production. Early in the 2020s it seemed like a number of old names from the tech industry were also going to dominate the urrgh industry: Sony, Samsung, IBM, Lenovo. However, it soon became clear that the old tech companies had the wrong kind of management structures for pioneering the new industry. A host of newer companies sprang up. The public only gradually became aware of urgghs. Many people point to 2026 as a turning point. If you measure the number of articles being written about urrghs in the popular press, there is a 10x jump between 2025 and 2027. By 2028 there were young people confidently describing themselves as "urrgh professionals", the implication being that they were going to make their whole careers in the new industry. The early 2030s saw explosive growth in the industry. After the recession of 2038, economists pointed out that the urrgh industry had been the leading cause of economic growth during the last business cycle, and would likely play a major role in the next business cycle. On the eve of the next recession, in 2046, the urrgh industry was employing 1 million people in the USA. We all know at some point in the future there will be some new industry that sweeps the world and generates a lot of economic growth. The only question is how much any one given nation will dominate that industry. But that raises a different issue, an issue about national competitiveness, which should not be confused with issues of one nations unemployment, unless you want to make the explicit argument that some nation is stealing jobs from some other nation. Which can be true in some circumstances, but those circumstances need to be made explicit, for the conversation to have any meaning. The thing is, it's hard to know what the next big thing is. Generally, those countries that have the fastest growth in productivity also have the lowest unemployment rates. That might seem counter-intuitive, until you think about what productivity allows: it means you can produce more, at the same or higher quality, than you did before. If your productivity goes up at 10% a year, and your competitor only goes up at 5% a year, then pretty soon you can make more of whatever you make, at higher quality and lower cost, than your competitor. This applies to nations as well as companies. Back when Japan had 7% productivity gains every year, and the USA had 2% productivity gains every year, Japan had close to 0% unemployment. But if you believe, as you suggest, that rapidly rising productivity increases unemployment, rather than reducing it, then you would assume that Japan would have higher unemployment than the USA, back when its productivity was higher. But we know the opposite was true. Even worse, if you took your own argument seriously, then you would have to argue that falling productivity is a good thing since it would mean more jobs for everyone. But I assume you are smart enough to avoid doing that.