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People keep saying there will be more jobs "when the economy gets better". But in the last 10 years so many jobs were offshored/oursourced, and they're not coming back. Especially manufacturing, software, phone call centers. In this sense, the economy is not going to go back to the way it was in 2000.
American software people are going to have to shift into new fields of work and that's not just temporary.
But what about factory workers whose jobs were sent to other countries? I mean a lot of unemployed people are "waiting for the economy to get better" - but is this the wrong viewpoint?
Somebody wrote a book called "Death of the American Middle Class" - I haven't read it but I know what it's about.
This may be an overstatement, but it's almost like America lost some fingers or even a limb, and people are waiting for it to grow back so we can go and play ball again, but it's not going to. We have to learn a new game.
People keep saying there will be more jobs "when the economy gets better". But in the last 10 years so many jobs were offshored/oursourced, and they're not coming back. Especially manufacturing, software, phone call centers. In this sense, the economy is not going to go back to the way it was in 2000.
American software people are going to have to shift into new fields of work and that's not just temporary.
But what about factory workers whose jobs were sent to other countries? I mean a lot of unemployed people are "waiting for the economy to get better" - but is this the wrong viewpoint?
Somebody wrote a book called "Death of the American Middle Class" - I haven't read it but I know what it's about.
This may be an overstatement, but it's almost like America lost some fingers or even a limb, and people are waiting for it to grow back so we can go and play ball again, but it's not going to. We have to learn a new game.
That's a very static view. Yes, jobs have gone overseas. That's the market at work. Those were, largely, jobs that could be moved to locations where labor was cheaper, for whatever reason, without appreciable loss of quality.
But, that's not why the middle class has shrunk. It's shrunk because the foundations that support a strong middle class, such as education, have been starved of funding while, at the same time, those foundations have been failing to respond to a changing world.
At it's core, the problem is that we're, as a nation, still trying to do work that we're no longer the most suitable country for while failing to do the high-tech and high-intelligence work that a developed nation should be suited to.
But, that's not why the middle class has shrunk. It's shrunk because the foundations that support a strong middle class, such as education, have been starved of funding while, at the same time, those foundations have been failing to respond to a changing world.
Meh. If anything "those foundations" been responding too much.
The "middle class" has shrunk because at the same time the "upper class" has drawn ever more
wealth to their relatively static number... the "lower class" has been allowed and even encouraged
to expand their number by orders of magnitude beyond their capacity to pay their own way.
Once upon a time poorly educated and minimally trained people could still count on decent
enough wages and pretty good benefits to support themselves and their families on from the
industrial and labor employment that was the first category of US employment offshored.
The problem is in the math: Too many forks poised over the pie tin looking for a bite.
Who is going to pay to feed and clothe and house and doctor these people?
Meh. If anything "those foundations" been responding too much.
The "middle class" has shrunk because at the same time the "upper class" has drawn ever more
wealth to their relatively static number... the "lower class" has been allowed and even encouraged
to expand their number by orders of magnitude beyond their capacity to pay their own way.
Once upon a time poorly educated and minimally trained people could still count on decent
enough wages and pretty good benefits to support themselves and their families on from the
industrial and labor employment that was the first category of US employment offshored.
The problem is in the math: Too many forks poised over the pie tin looking for a bite.
Who is going to pay to feed and clothe and house and doctor these people?
In theory? The same groups who did it 40 years ago: a strong middle class and the wealthy. But, the wealthy have been hacking away pounds of flesh from the middle class.
In theory? The same groups who did it 40 years ago: a strong middle class and the wealthy.
And they (we) could have done this over the last 40 years too. In theory. But that didn't happen.
Quote:
But, the wealthy have been hacking away pounds of flesh from the middle class.
True... but the "lower classes" may have taken even more from the "middle class".
But the "middle class" might still be able to get some of it back from the "upper classes"...
which will never happen once the cash is poured down the abyss of the "lower classes".
Absent the need for anywhere near as many of those poorly educated and minimally trained people
as we once had jobs for (as we have been progressing toward over the last forty years) we made the
fatal mistake of not doing something about the rate of reproduction by them. Allowing even more
of them to join us by means of failed immigration policy may have been even worse.
The US could have an even stronger middle class than we used to have and still afford the wealthy.
We chose to support public policies that worked against our best interests.
Last edited by MrRational; 12-13-2012 at 03:25 PM..
And they (we) could have done this over the last 40 years too. In theory. But that didn't happen.
True... but the "lower classes" may have taken even more from the "middle class".
But the "middle class" might still be able to get some of it back from the "upper classes"...
which will never happen once the cash is poured down the abyss of the "lower classes".
Absent the need for anywhere near as many of those poorly educated and minimally trained people
as we once had jobs for (as we have been progressing toward over the last forty years) we made the
fatal mistake of not doing something about the rate of reproduction by them. Allowing even more
of them to join us by means of failed immigration policy may have been even worse.
The US could have an even stronger middle class than we used to have and still afford the wealthy.
We chose to support public policies that worked against our best interests.
This is a key point on which we differ. I say that the spending has followed, not preceded, the growth of the bottom quints as the middle class has slid in to it.
I say that the spending has followed, not preceded, the growth of the bottom quints
as the middle class has slid in to it.
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.
It may well be that the large middle class was an aberration all along doomed to fail, to shrink as markets changed worldwide. The mantra that education will solve all problems is just that--a mantra. A bright person with a computer can do the work that took, say 10 or 100 people to do in the past. How many engineers do you really need? Historically, the rich and powerful exist everywhere even in communist/socialistic countries. France might be the exception when the French got rid of most of its elite class via the guillotine. The rich and powerful do not give up their status and nowadays they work hard to maintain it vis-a-vis lawyers and off-shore banks. Don't expect anything to change for that class of people. The middle class used to be owners of small, successful businesses. Those are gone in rural America and that is working its way into urban America via big box stores and online shopping. Amazon has killed as many businesses as Walmart and the trend will not stop.
The question is, what happens in America? Seems that the mantra of a college degree continues to be preached and many young people go to college and go into debt for a degree that is useless. Better not finishe in bottom 2/3s of a law school and better not go to a lower tier law school or lower tier college. Outsourcing made possible through the internet (thank you Al Gore?) was another middle class killer. Technology will continue to take away jobs. Japan is in bad shape for jobs. Even China is losing jobs to countries who have even lower wage scales. India is an economic nightmare for China.
For my part, I fully expect to see the standard of living for Americans to decline. Rural American towns are dead or dying. Go drive through them. Abandoned buildings. Dilapidated landscape. Litter. Unkept houses. Business signs falling down, rusted. There is little energy among people. Of course they voted for Mr. Obama hoping the government checks would continue to come. Hard to blame them when things seem so hopeless.
More and more Americans are going to experience what the black community has experienced all along. More whites will be looking for public housing. As many whites already on EBT.
Things are going to get worse and progressively more hopeless. Hard to reverse that with just words of "better days are coming". No, they are not.
The question is, what happens in America?
For my part, I fully expect to see the standard of living for Americans to decline.
Rural American towns are dead or dying.
Things are going to get worse and progressively more hopeless.
Hard to reverse that with just words of "better days are coming". No, they are not.
The mantra that education will solve all problems is just that--a mantra.
A bright person with a computer can do the work that took, say 10 or 100 people to do in the past.
This push to job based education came in response to the demise of so many labor based jobs.
The premise was that gravitating to more intellect based jobs would be required.
It was and still is largely correct... the error was in expecting the same numbers of people to remain.
The US that I knew as a young man, with perhaps 240,000,000 should still be viable.
Certainly the 200,000,000 level that existed when I was in diapers should work.
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)
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.
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