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A major consequence of modern economics (outsourcing & automation specifically) is that America has been hollowed out. People are jamming into a handful of major cities and causing a housing crunch there, while many small towns and cities have been half-emptied. They have no more industry and are just ghost towns with most remaining people on welfare, and dependent on the State or Federal govt to support basic services. I recently read an article about small towns in Pennsylvania that got rid of their local police departments and rely on the state troopers instead.
I can only think of 4 options:
1) Just accept that a large number of people will remain on welfare programs.
2) Declare these places "Economic Disaster Areas" and buy out the people the same way that the govt does for flood prone areas. Demolish the towns or just leave them there. Close the highway exits to the towns. Relocate the residents to areas where there are more jobs. This of course assumes that the majority of people will try to find jobs, and not just continue to milk welfare in a more expensive area.
3) Hope that Trump is successful in bringing back the jobs from overseas.
4) Similar to #3, impose some kind of incentives for companies within the U.S. to spread jobs out again from major cities to these low-cost areas.
There is another way. We like to support the idea of individual freedom. People can pack up and move to areas where there are jobs. That has been going on for a long time.
We already have very low unemployment and many areas of the country where businesses are having a hard time finding workers. The jobs that were lost are not coming back, ever. Many of the jobs were in agriculture and ranching. Those industries have changed and mechanized. Fewer workers are needed. In fact very few are needed and the number keeps decreasing. Lots of jobs in small towns and cities involved retail sales. Those days are ending as well. Retailing is becoming more efficient with larger stores, fewer jobs, and in many cases internet sales have taken over. US manufacturing jobs started to decline in the 1970s well before globalization. The reason was automation, then computers and robotics. The old, low skilled manufacturing jobs are largely gone, forever.
A final issue is the matter of skills and education. There are plenty of jobs for those with an education, even specialized Associates level training, or for those who have skills as tradesmen. Those without skills are sinking to the bottom of the economic ladder.
I think a lot of people relocate themselves away from these places. My grandmother used to have a summer home in the Appalachian mountains in a very small town. I've been there a few times to visit and I speak to the locals. Many of them are elderly and their kids moved to population centers with more jobs.
People have been leaving the rural life for centuries. I just don't see that changing. Hospitals good schools, entertainment, these things all cluster around cities. And I think they always have.
We could incentivize businesses to hire telecommuters. The people in the dead end towns could work telecommute jobs. The unskilled could work call center jobs from home and the skilled could do tech jobs. The technology already exists and is used by many employers.
it really is pretty crazy if you think about the problem and what it will do to our economy as automation and the eventual consolidation of corporations into Zorg like entities force more and more people out of the work force.
Let's look at a few things here. Cashiers, stockers, waiters, truck drivers, taxis, bar tenders etc are all going to be replaced probably sooner rahter than later. At a minimum the need for these types will be greatly reduced by apps, auto check outs, NFC style aisles, self driving cars/trucks etc.
Realtors, already starting to see the beginning of the end. Almost no reason to have a selling agent anymore with the flat fee listing services. So that cuts commission in half to what it used to be only 10 years ago. Hell in many areas 3% to selling agent is considered great! with many listings offer 2.5% or less. Obviously dependent on area but for the most part realtor leverage has dropped considerably compared to just 5 or 10 years ago. Real estate also has a low barrier to entry so competition is fierce for an ever smaller pie.
Insurance agents. Hell if we go single payer health agents will be even more marginalized. Even P&C though you're seeing a ton of consolidation and a massive move towards direct writing. The days of buying through a mom and pop shop are quickly coming to a close as you can hop online and get a policy from you computer now. Generally faster and cheaper. Why pay the agent 15% when you can have some flunkie sell policies for $12/hr in a call center.
Banks. Remember when you had a bank on every conrer and a ton of branch options. Back in the days of Friday lines to cash checks. Banks have been shrinking their foot prints for a decade now and it will continue. All decent jobs that will continue to be eroded.
CPAs. All it will take is simplification of the tax code. Talk about a profession that has seen much of its rise due to complicated government BS. There will always be a need for numbers guys, just won't need nearly as many if the tax code gets simplified.
What does that leave us?
Laywers? Dime a dozen already.
Medical? Ok, one good field that will see growth and likely continue to expand as we move closer and closer to everyone having actual coverage.
Aside from medical what else?
Programming, engineering etc. Ok sure. However you'll be competing with India, China and every other second and third world country that will be churning out "good enough" candidates that can be trained and $$$ can be saved.
Bottom line is the good jobs are going to be contracting, corporate productivity is going to continue to sky rocket as they automate, downsize and consolidate weak hands in the market place. We have been replacing good jobs with not so good for a bit now, although that seems like it will be coming to a close as technology continues it's march to making human involvement unneeded.
It might take 100 years but slowly over the next century the idea of "work" is going to change a lot. Perhaps our entire economic system.
We have 2 options:
1. Base human worth on their success, take "MLSfan" type advice to heart and simply say ****'em as more and more people get displaced from the work force. Mother nature will deal with it. Ultimately we'll live in dome like cities where "workers" will be allowed peaceful existences and the rest of the dredges will be expelled into the wilderness to live in the wild lands.
2. Everyone will be treated equally and you'll see some kind of UBI. Most likely not money as that would screw with inflation but more likely a WIC / voucher program that provides essential foods and housing to people regardless if they work or not.
The biggest issue with our economy right now (short term) is how one dimensional it is and how dependent it is on debt spending. Not just the government but also consumers. You know, since wages have been stagnant for more than 30 years. You can only rack up so much debt and when the spending slows, oh man, yeah, it's going to be bad. Very difficult to recover quickly from such a thing so when the house of cards tumbles it will take some time to get it back.
A major consequence of modern economics (outsourcing & automation specifically) is that America has been hollowed out. People are jamming into a handful of major cities and causing a housing crunch there, while many small towns and cities have been half-emptied. They have no more industry and are just ghost towns with most remaining people on welfare, and dependent on the State or Federal govt to support basic services. I recently read an article about small towns in Pennsylvania that got rid of their local police departments and rely on the state troopers instead.
I can only think of 4 options:
1) Just accept that a large number of people will remain on welfare programs.
2) Declare these places "Economic Disaster Areas" and buy out the people the same way that the govt does for flood prone areas. Demolish the towns or just leave them there. Close the highway exits to the towns. Relocate the residents to areas where there are more jobs. This of course assumes that the majority of people will try to find jobs, and not just continue to milk welfare in a more expensive area.
3) Hope that Trump is successful in bringing back the jobs from overseas.
4) Similar to #3, impose some kind of incentives for companies within the U.S. to spread jobs out again from major cities to these low-cost areas.
I hope nobody already said this. I just saw the "hope that Trump brings back jobs from overseas" and had to respond:
Trump didn't save 1100 jobs at the Carrier plant. That number includes 300 jobs which were in no danger of being moved to Mexico. The real number is 800. Carrier is still moving 600 jobs to Mexico to make fan coils. Carrier also confirmed that a second factory owned by Carrier corporate parent United Technologies (UTX) is also still moving to Mexico. That move will cost Indiana another 700 jobs. In its letter to employees, Carrier said that laid-off workers will have the chance to transfer to open jobs at other United Technologies plants around the country. They'll also receive up to four years of tuition assistance to go back to school and train for another job.It's also possible that the company will offer someIndianapolis factory workers a buyout. For another view on this, read https://www.washingtonpost.com/poste...=.67ac02df150e
One should never read news from only one source and think you have the story.
As for Ford, the layoffs have been postponed but Ford is still building a plant in Mexico.
The problem is that factories have become more efficient through the use of robotics. Robots don't get a salary, pension, benefits, healthcare. There's no way businesses would shelve robots upon the word of Trump or anyone except maybe Jesus Christ. Even then, it's a maybe. So when one robot does the work of 12 employees, who are now laid off, there's nothing Trump can do. The nature of manufacturing has changed. It's just desperate or naive to believe anything else. The only way to get former factory workers back to work is to retrain them for the jobs which do exist. But there are human self-limitations. People who haven't been to school in decades might not have the ability and/or the desire to go back to school for training to program or service the robots. I read an article which said that male workers don't want to work in the health care fields because they view it as womens' work. These jobs don't start out paying as much as factory jobs, but with seniority can approach that pay. And it's a sad, misogynist fact that men who go into fields which are traditionally populated by women are promoted more quickly and get raises more quickly than women with the same time and experience in the job.
The actual job themselves have changed, and will continue to change. Do we have anyone making a living shoveling coal into a steam locomotive engine anymore? Nobody has made a living lighting the gas streetlights in over a century. There's no more keypunch operators. Trump got elected by telling desperate people what they wanted to hear.
This problem is nothing new. As changes are made in the USA, there are always going to be this problem. 60 years ago, it took 1/3rd of all working Americans to just grow the food for the residents. Now it takes 1.5% to do the same, due to the modern machinery. What happened to all the buggy wheel makers, and buggy whip makers. The truth is, it is not as much a change today as in the past.
In just a few years, the U.S. has seen the population grow. On Tuesday, October 17, 2006 the estimated population of the United States crossed the 300 million mark, up again to 323,148,587 just 10 years later. That is triple of what it was in 1915, up from 200 million in 1967, and up from 100 million mark in 1915.
In 100 years, the U.S. tripled in population. In 1950 to 2,000 the percentage of women working outside the home doubled. It was really more than that we must consider. As the number of women in this country nearly doubled. So the female workforce about tripled.
The employment experts tell us, that in just 10 years, that half the jobs people will be working in at that time, have not even been invented yet.
There are areas of the country with a need for jobs, and people will move to find jobs just as they have done since the Mayflower. It is not the dire picture that some people think it is.
And some states pay considerably less money for the same job. However when cost of living is taken into consideration, in many of the lower paid areas the people actually have more spendable income and live better than they do in the high priced areas of the country.
As an example take Texas and California. In the period of a few years, California has increased 50% in population. In that same period of time, White Middle Class has been fleeing California to the extent there are 5,000,000 less white people in California while the population has increased by 50%. Many just moved to other states, as their jobs left California moving to other parts of the country where cost of doing business was way lower, as in California was no longer profitable for them to have their company having these jobs in California.
Use the following calculator to evaluate 5 states, and find what the income difference is both median income for the job, and what the actual value of the salary for buying power after adjusting for the cost of living there. Just select the occupation, then select any 5 states, to find out what the same job will pay after adjusting for cost of living in the area.
Just think the most populated states, and the ones with the highest pay, have the highest poverty rate, when the household incomes are adjusted for the cost of living. California leads the way, with nearly 25% of all California residents living in poverty. That is way higher than the next closest state.
As one industry loses jobs, another field gains jobs, and new type jobs keep being created. If the population growth slowed down, there would not be enough people in the United States to fill all the available jobs.
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