Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
"The question is what we do about the 100,000,000 or so surplus people.
(Then of course we still have a similar ratio of surplus everywhere else too)"
Well, Logan's Run had it figured out. They got rid of you when you turned a certain age. What was it? 30? People got scared of the Obama "death panels". That is the one thing that makes perfect sense to me regarding Medicare/Medicaid. If you meet certain criteria, then you proceed to death without terribly expensive intervention. I'm all for that. Just give me the drugs. That leaves you 99,999,999 to deal with.
Amazing how it has become the elderly we envy the most with their pensions, paid for homes, gated communities, health insurance and a sense that the young must pay and pay and pay.
Going to be severe consequences and a lot worse than people think.
It's not just manufacturing that saw large scale offshoring. If anything, automation and technology has caused a great deal of jobs to simply vanish into thin air. The upside is this will likely lead to a migration of manufacturing work back into the country, since this technology greatly reduces the need for labor, making labor costs a much less significant part of the equation. Given that we have very cheap energy, I'm willing to bet we will continue to see work trickling back to America for years to come. This "work" will not necessarily lead to a large scale job growth, and this is where one should be concerned...
Businesses in every industry and sector of the economy have been focusing on efficiency. Doing more with less is the order of the day, and this is especially true regarding labor. I laughed in high school when the economy textbooks suggested technology was going to lead to higher wages for the workers since they were going to be more productive. Since labor is merely a commodity, it's value is dictated by supply and demand. If we need less of it, wages will drop. We will also have lines of displaced workers in many professions and sectors (except government of course, which doesn't have to turn a profit).
What is the answer? Who knows. I gather the general public will slowly migrate towards socialist, and even communist tenancies as the divide between the haves and have nots grows. On the bright side, it seems people are finding ways to adapt by having fewer children. Population stabilization will be the best thing for all parties involved. No sense spewing out more future cyclically unemployed participants. Unfortunately, our boarders appear to be made of swiss cheese, and we are importing unwanted poverty. Yet another problem compounding every other problem we face.
IF I were going to try and start a business that made something, the US is the last place I'd consider. I'd pick India, Vietnam or some place where you don't have government rules and regulations harassing you every step of the way. I know business owners who would sell their business today if they could get a buyer. They worry about getting sued by an employee who only has to make a complaint to the EEOC which will help them wring out the employer who has to pay for their own lawyers. Seen that up close and personal. Fool with American labor? No way.
I'd love to think you are correct about jobs coming back, but if they do, it will be a trickle and not a flood. Americans seem to believe they are entitled to their opinion in the workplace. No, you are not. You are entitled to do your work according to the specifications laid out by your company. If you won't do that, you are history. So you would think.
"What is the answer? Who knows. I gather the general public will slowly migrate towards socialist, and even communist tendencies as the divide between the haves and have-nots grows. On the bright side, it seems people are finding ways to adapt by having fewer children. Population stabilization will be the best thing for all parties involved. No sense spewing out more future cyclically unemployed participants."
I vote Republican but socialism is inevitable. Massive unemployment is the future and it is unavoidable. All the products and services that everyone needs are being supplied by x number of people, and the number of people alive is much greater than x. We just have more people than we need.
The ceiling on population is not going to be limits on natural resources as everyone thought, it is going to be the number of people who are useful plus the number who are not. What we call unacceptable unemployment numbers now are nothing compared with what the new normal is going to be.
IF I were going to try and start a business that made something, the US is the last place I'd consider. I'd pick India, Vietnam or some place where you don't have government rules and regulations harassing you every step of the way. I know business owners who would sell their business today if they could get a buyer. They worry about getting sued by an employee who only has to make a complaint to the EEOC which will help them wring out the employer who has to pay for their own lawyers. Seen that up close and personal. Fool with American labor? No way.
I'd love to think you are correct about jobs coming back, but if they do, it will be a trickle and not a flood. Americans seem to believe they are entitled to their opinion in the workplace. No, you are not. You are entitled to do your work according to the specifications laid out by your company. If you won't do that, you are history. So you would think.
The biggest employer will be the government.
So, when that friendly foreign government turns a blind eye to reverse engineering while refusing to acknowledge your patent, I guess you'll be down with that too. When they are selling away your millions in R&D expenses for pennies on the dollar, that won't be any worry.
When your foreign laborers screw up a batch of widgets that took 4 months for you to receive, that won't be any problem. No problem with your multi million dollar (all financed and accruing interest) line sitting idle and waiting for them to get it right.
Surely it won't be a problem when labor and energy costs continue to sky rocket in foreign countries. Just pass worry about tallying the expenses tomorrow, no need for accountability today.
I assume you don't quite understand the full nature of manufacturing. It goes far above simply having the product made. Lot's of little in betweens and down the roads that have to be considered and accounted for. Labor costs, while significant, are just one component in the equation.
If you were having something made, that doesn't necessarily mean you have to be the one making it. Plenty of job shops in America that manufacture other people's ideas. How many Apple employees actually manufacture Apple products? Many large companies simply design the intended product, and then decide who to outsource the actual manufacturing of the product to.
The argument I make is that cheaper energy and continuous improvements in automated manufacturing products will continue to make America a better option for many products. Labor intensive work like clothing will likely never return to America in a big way. Anything that can be done by a robot is another matter entirely. This is what will be continuing to pull work back home.
My suspicion is that a lot of people are simply living off of accumulated capital right now, without being able to generate much of their own new capital. This can be anything from living with relatives for free or reduced rent to living off of income/assets accumulated years ago, gradually eating into their "seed corn," as it were. There has always been some of this going on, but it seems more common in recent times. The labor force is contracting even as the amount of "stuff" that America produces continues to rise.
As others note, this is pretty good evidence that we just don't need as much human labor anymore to run the American economy. Of course, there is still a lot of labor required, and that will probably be true for a while, which is why we are entering into a lengthy and contentious transition period. There are still labor shortages in some areas, and in some fields, but the overall trend is displacement of human labor as a requirement for any sort of production, even of some types of "intellectual capital" (data mining software replacing human document reviewers, for example).
A lot of people are going to have a very rough time accepting this reality. And they will fight against it. They will find examples of labor shortages, and make comments along the lines of "See? There are jobs doing X! The problem is that people are too lazy/untrained/unwilling to do X!" But "X" is a moving target, geographically and otherwise. We'll get to a point where following X will require a sort of vagabond detachment from any sort of permanent life, as the labor flits from place to place. A large chunk of the population is simply unwilling or unable to live in that fashion.
So, the gaps get papered over for the moment with a combination of government aid and private transfers. But for how long...
150 to 300 a day doing work americans will not do.. please We will and do them all the time. I have made almost a million dollars over the last 10 years in cash doing that kind of work. The problem is people are lazy and feel like it has to be a job they really enjoy.. They never learn common sense. People make 60k a year pay 30 percent in taxes, and then they pay someone like me 10 to 15 percent to fix their car,house, etc.. so when its all said and done they bring home 500 a week. I bring home 1500 if I feel like working. I am the dumb unskilled guy who needs to get a real job. please teach your kids basic common sense like mechanical,carpentry,welding,plumbing,roofing,etc. . You would be surprised at the jobs that are out there. Illegal mexicans are cleaning up on dumb lazy americans. I personally cant stand to watch how stupid people are making their kids lazy and making their boys cry when they dont get the same job as their girlfriend. man up a million in cash doing the kind of work you think is unskilled. Do it yourself and save your money.
I say that the spending has followed the growth of the bottom quints as well.
I also say that we had plenty of warning about the foolishness of allowing their growth.
As to solutions... they lie in either somehow creating meaningful employment for the poorly educated
and minimally trained such that they can (again) earn their own way... or we have to thin their ranks.
The moderately to well educated and trained can't afford to keep feeding them.
This reads a lot like population control. That's insane. It doesn't work, and creates huge distortions in demographics, always with unintended harmful consequences with long tails.
The reality is that it is in our best economic interest as a country to support the poor. Poverty is a vicious trap. Even those who escape poverty permanently see lifelong depressed wages compared to those who are otherwise equal except have never experienced poverty.
The solution to shrinking the ranks of the poor and growing the middle class is education. We know that the future is in jobs which require a high degree of general and specific education. But, we've focused on one form of education and have found it hasn't achieved the desired results. The current system doesn't work; it's neither rigorous nor effective. We try to do too much and yet we wonder why so little sticks. We present a lot of very dry information that is not obviously valuable to students and wonder why they don't pay attention in class and are so hard to motivate.
Where we do teach interesting material with a high value for students in a thoughtful way, we see strong student engagement and high returns on investment.
We have to be mindful that this is an infinite race; this is the Red Queen Theory in action. Today's lessons have a diminishing value in the future as contexts change. That doesn't mean education itself is losing value, only that yesterday's education isn't as valuable as tomorrow's.
Andywire makes a good point about why business is still so strong in the US, despite its problems. We spend a lot on R&D, we have a robust IP system, we have some very good universities (even if the system as a whole is struggling), lending rates are absurdly low, and, until the last few years while the Republican party wasn't taking a scorched Earth policy to legislation, we knew what the business regulatory climate would be like, more or less.
Quote:
Originally Posted by andywire
So, when that friendly foreign government turns a blind eye to reverse engineering while refusing to acknowledge your patent, I guess you'll be down with that too. When they are selling away your millions in R&D expenses for pennies on the dollar, that won't be any worry.
When your foreign laborers screw up a batch of widgets that took 4 months for you to receive, that won't be any problem. No problem with your multi million dollar (all financed and accruing interest) line sitting idle and waiting for them to get it right.
Surely it won't be a problem when labor and energy costs continue to sky rocket in foreign countries. Just pass worry about tallying the expenses tomorrow, no need for accountability today.
I assume you don't quite understand the full nature of manufacturing. It goes far above simply having the product made. Lot's of little in betweens and down the roads that have to be considered and accounted for. Labor costs, while significant, are just one component in the equation.
If you were having something made, that doesn't necessarily mean you have to be the one making it. Plenty of job shops in America that manufacture other people's ideas. How many Apple employees actually manufacture Apple products? Many large companies simply design the intended product, and then decide who to outsource the actual manufacturing of the product to.
The argument I make is that cheaper energy and continuous improvements in automated manufacturing products will continue to make America a better option for many products. Labor intensive work like clothing will likely never return to America in a big way. Anything that can be done by a robot is another matter entirely. This is what will be continuing to pull work back home.
The reality is that it is in our best economic interest as a country to not create poor in the first place.
Focus on that.
I did "focus on that" by putting in a plug for education. The reality is that the poor have always and will always exist. The only way to not inflate the number of poor individuals is to give them the ability to seize upon opportunities for growth, namely through said education.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
