[Ghostwheel]

	Originally Posted by Fecal McAngry To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
	As technology replaces one task people are employed to do, people find other tasks to do.

Textbook theory ... and a prime example of magical thinking. The "magic" is in the assumption that there are always other tasks available to do, and that the same quality of living can be had in the doing of them.

But there aren't always other tasks to do when the things that people need and want can be supplied by dramatically less producers than there are consumers. You can't have an economy of people who merely do each other's laundry, and not everyone can be an entrepreneur. A productive economy requires people be engaged in productive tasks, and automation and outsourcing mean a lot of us are unneeded and superfluous to that end.

For example, there's the case of Wal-Mart. They come into town and blow out all the small businesses, proving that less and less of us are needed as producers these days:

“Studies from all across the country show that Wal-Mart's arrival does not bring the increase in jobs and retail spending that the company promises,” said Brian Paul, Center Fellow and Masters of Urban Planning Candidate at Hunter College. “Instead, Wal-Mart captures spending from existing stores, driving them out of business and replacing existing retail jobs with lower-paying Wal-Mart jobs. Link: To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

	Originally Posted by Fecal McAngry To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
	Productivity rises, and standards of living rise. The fact that "the benefits of technology are distributed unequally" is beside the point, whether true or untrue.

Another maxim from the guys that, until twenty years ago, didn't know that human beings were not, in fact, "rational self-interest maximizers."

No, as productivity rises, peoples standard of living does not always rise. The standard thinking is that improvements in productivity leads to a rise in living standards because employers can then afford to pay their employees more. Except that when you have a "race to the bottom" as far as employees go, it ain't necessarily so:

1.

By contrast, most manufactured goods these days are the product of global supply chains, which may include multiple countries and border crossings. Your smartphone, for example, is assembled from components that were manufactured all over the world. On a less high-tech note, the cedar hangers that organically keep your suits and dresses free of pests may be made of wood grown in the U.S., shipped to China for manufacture, and then shipped back to the U.S. again. Given the dominance of global supply chains, manufacturers and distributers both have two very different strategies available to them for cutting costs. On the one hand, they can invest in raising productivity in their domestic operations. A midwestern auto factory can rearrange its assembly line to produce more cars with fewer workers; a retailer can shift more sales to its online division; a real estate agency can invest in contact-management software to help fewer brokers manage more potential buyers and sellers. Alternatively, companies can cut costs by seeking out cheaper suppliers around the world—to use the business school term, they can engage in global supply chain management. A U.S.-based computer company can lower its costs by moving its customer call center from South Dakota to India, Walmart can shift its clothing purchases from a Chinese shirt manufacturer to a cheaper supplier in Vietnam. Apple can find a cheaper offshore supplier for its iPhone display screen. But here’s the rub: both of these corporate strategies— domestic productivity improvements and global supply chain management—show up as productivity gains in U.S. economic records. When federal statisticians calculate the nation’s economic output, what they are actually measuring is domestic “value added”—the dollar value of all sales minus the dollar value of all imports. “Productivity” is then calculated by dividing the quantity of value added by the number of American workers. American workers, however, often have little to do with the gains in productivity attributed to them. For instance, if Company A saves $250,000 simply by switching from a Japanese sprocket supplier to a much cheaper Chinese sprocket supplier, that change shows up as an increase in American productivity—just as if the company had saved $250,000 by making its warehouse operation in Chicago more efficient. [....] Link: To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

That $250,000 is pure profit for owners, as the workforce has absolutely nothing to do with the apparent gain in productivity.


2.

[T]he question [is] whether increases in produtivity result in wage increases for workers, as most economists believe. I have taken the position that this is not necessarily the case --- that in most instances productivity increases lower wages. We were discussing this issue as it applies to machinests: [....] Machinists used to be a skilled job whereby the machinist had to know some geometry in order to cut the parts out to proper tolerances. These days machines are computer-driven, so a "machinist" is just a guy who picks up a slab of metal and locks it down into the machine. No skill at all. That is a perfect example of the reason why produtivity improvements do not increase wages. The computer-driven capital equipment in use by machine shops has replaced a factory that used to have 300 machinists making $20 an hour, with benefits and pensions, with 50 Mexican peons making $7 an hour and no benefits. The profit of the company has increased, while the wages have been reduced by 80%.... Link: To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

What do you imagine those out-of-work machinists will do? They can't all become lawyers, entrepreneurs and software prodigies. Ergo, as quoted in the OP, you have this:

	In April the number of people not in the labor force rose by a whopping 522,000 from 87,897,000 to 88,419,000. This is the highest on record. The flip side, and the reason why the unemployment dropped to 8.1% is that the labor force participation rate just dipped to a new 30 year low of 64.3%.

But wait! There are "other tasks" for those 88.4 million people to do. At Wal-Mart!

• Wal-Mart’s average annual pay of $20,774 is below the Federal Poverty Level for a family of four. • A Wal-Mart spokesperson publicly acknowledged in 2004 that, "More than two thirds of our people... are not trying to support a family. That’s who our jobs are designed for.” • Wal-Mart’s 2010 health care offerings have a high annual deductible of $4,400 which means a family would have to spend $5,102 of their own money on health care before Wal-Mart’s insurance pays anything. Based on the average salary of a Wal-Mart employee this payment represents almost 25% of their annual income.

	Originally Posted by Fecal McAngry To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
	I don't know about you, but if some economic deity approached me and offered to improve my standard of living by 100% while improving the standard of living of "the top 1%" by 10000%, I'd jump at the offer...

I would decline the bargain. With that 10,000% the oligarchs would continue solidifying their hold on government, the media, and everything else. Money is power and influence. The super-rich won't just buy more cars and houses; they'll buy more government. Then they'll cut your wages, take away your freedoms, freely engage in fraud in banking and financial services on a massive scale, start wars to secure markets overseas and huge defense contracts, and do whatever else they like.

Oops! They do that already!
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I mean, they'll do even more of it!

Concentration of immense wealth are concentrations of immense power.

[larkin]

	Originally Posted by themuzicman To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
	Yeah, Obama care isn't point at socialism at all...

That's your response to being that wrong? What, no more articles from gold standard sites to link to?

Here's a snapshot of the actual number of jobs created under Obama, by the way.

[HIDE="Jobs Created Since 2007"]
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[/HIDE]

And a primary reason the employment rate isn't higher than it is?
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, mostly at the state level. And in case that just seems like the "liberal media," from
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. Of course, they think those job losses are all a good thing - because, like you, unemployment is such an important issue to them, undoubtedly.

	Originally Posted by eagleseven To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
	I am tickled by the argument that more investment in education will improve the economy, as though they don't notice the massive number of underemployed college grads and unemployed highschool grads. [...] It's not an education problem, we've never been more educated. It's a jobs problem.

"Massive number?" Outside of the fabulous anecdotal evidence provided, the actual
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, and on the decline. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate for those without a high school diploma is around 15%. As the article says - the number one determinant in unemployment is education level.

And Polymath is right - there are jobs, but the workforce isn't always appropriately trained for them. "Education" doesn't necessarily refer to only primary or even secondary education.

	Originally Posted by Aronnax To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
	These stories are commonly promoted by industry to externalize training costs and/or generate an excuse to bring in lower cost labor on H1B's (depending on the skill level of the labor).

Sure, but that doesn't make them any less true. There's demand for skilled labor.

[thod]

Unemployment amongst college grads at 4%? You can't seriously believe that.

Education provides employment in the education industry. It simultaneously removes workers from the numbers as they are reclassified as students. The country is the most educated it has ever been. Which must indicate unemployment is the lowest it has ever been, right? It should be quite clear that there is no correlation between national education level and unemployment. What those college kids are finding is that when everyone has a degree, it doesn't count for much. It never was about education, it was about ranking. The good openings are still there but now they go to those with top marks from elite universities. What the employers are interested in is employing the top 1%. Education only ever served an indication of this.

[themuzicman]

	Originally Posted by Polymath20 To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
	But we still have to figure out how to modernize America's work force. That, I think, would be the most appropriate course of action.

What we need to figure out is that we need to lower the cost to hire an employee.

[larkin]

Originally Posted by thod To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

Unemployment amongst college grads at 4%? You can't seriously believe that. [...] Education provides employment in the education industry. It simultaneously removes workers from the numbers as they are reclassified as students. The country is the most educated it has ever been. Which must indicate unemployment is the lowest it has ever been, right? It should be quite clear that there is no correlation between national education level and unemployment.

Sure, why believe the Bureau of Labor Statistics when we have your false correlation? The country is the most educated its ever been in no way means unemployment should be the lowest its ever been, especially since, as you posted upthread, the jobs we're hemorrhaging are lower-skill or unskilled labor, and unemployment is unevenly distributed to reflect that. To say nothing of the other factors that are influencing unemployment - you know, 2008 and all that jazz.

	Originally Posted by themuzicman To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
	What we need to figure out is that we need to lower the cost to hire an employee.

I wonder if one way to do that would be to try to find a way to remove the expensive, burdensome and inefficient requirement on private industry to provide health care?

Nah. Just give them tax cuts. They'll trickle down, just like giving all that TARP money to the banks immediately resulted in more available capital, or domestic oil drilling has lowered our gas prices.

[thod]

	why believe the Bureau of Labor Statistics

"So you say you can't find a job?"
"That's right"
"Well let me see, do you speak French?"
"Oui"
"Do you have a wooden leg?"
"Tap, tap, tap"
"Ok how about a pierced left nipple?"
"Ah sorry, nope"
"Well then, you are not unemployed. The criteria are quite clear. If simply wanting a job were enough, lots of people would be unemployed."

[CrudeHypothesis]

Sucks to be in your country hey

[Daoist]

	Originally Posted by eagleseven To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
	Pulling a quick number, the US has roughly $131 trillion in assets ($106 trillion in liabilities). What percentage of that $131 trillion should the US Government control?

However big the
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is. My guesstimate is less than 3-4% of that $131 trillion - perhaps less than that because some of that money isn't necessarily intended for the government (though some of it clearly is.)

[Aronnax]

	Originally Posted by larkin To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
	Sure, but that doesn't make them any less true. There's demand for skilled labor.

There is, but at what salary? You can find skilled machinists, but you're not going to find many machinists willing to relocate thousands of miles to make $15.00/hr with a mediocre benefits package and poor job security to work in a new non-union auto plant. It's a transferable skill set, I know a lot of guys who'd rather deal with the feast/famine cycle of piecework as a welder rather than move for steady pay at a lower rate. It's anecdotal evidence but I keep running into this sentiment in a lot of places and across multiple trades.

For local youth, who don't face relocation problems, does the pay justify training for a few years? This is possibly something that could be resolved at a high school level but right now the salary doesn't seem to justify supplemental training beyond that. It's a sticky question: where exactly is the breakdown in promoting "skill" between the public and private spheres? Is there an absence of "skill" or is there insufficient incentive to bring "skill" to the doorstep of a new factory? My guess is it's a combination of the two.


On the white collar side of the fence, the "engineer shortage" follows a similar trend.
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are actually employed in the engineering field. Is there actually a shortage of engineers or does the profession lack the incentives to retain skilled engineers? This is one of the more interesting skill gaps, because most of the labor shortage is at mid to high levels of work experience (so it can't be addressed by increasing the number of people enrolled in universities). Meanwhile, new engineering graduates are getting funneled into other fields because engineering firms don't seem particularly interested in hiring and training new graduates. It's not terribly hard on the graduates, they can find other work due to the broad skill base an engineering degree provides. The problem is, it only contributes to the "skill gap" that the county is seeing at higher levels of experience. So the question becomes, are we educating enough engineers or is the private sector failing to provide the incentives and supplemental training needed to turn engineering graduates into experienced engineers?


We've gone a bit off base from the original post but eh, this is a more interesting topic.

[INTelliJent]

Arronnax makes a good point. If you go to job listing sites, there are tons of listings. For any [reasonably] paying job though you are going to inevitably see something like "5+ Years experience" in the requirements line.

More degrees won't fix that.

---------- Post added 05-05-2012 at 08:29 AM ----------

Conversely, people with no experience don't want to take lower pay and "work their way up". Students have been sold a bill of goods that all that college debt is going to immediately and assuredly translate into an excellent salary immediately out of school.

[JTG]

	Originally Posted by themuzicman To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
	Yeah, Obama care isn't point at socialism at all...

Social programs don't equate to socialist government. Socialism entails the fair distribution of profits among those who created the profits (i.e. not fucking over workers).

So strictly speaking, no. Governmental efforts to increase healthcare availability is not actually socialism. Plus i'm not sure why Repubs want to fight the idea tooth and nail. It's not like we're currently saving money with the alternative.

----

	Originally Posted by Fecal McAngry To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
	This same incorrect argument has been used for at least 200 years and is the source of one of my favorite words: To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

Apologies for my lack of clarity. My mental image of streamlining includes anything which makes a process cheaper and more efficient. The goal of streamlining is to increase profits at the top levels of a company, in spite of many people's belief that the goal is to make products more affordable. Affordability is a side-effect of streamlining plus competition, since execs are willing to let go of some profits if it means more significant market share.

The impact of automation isn't immediately apparent because we still need people to create the machines, computers, and software that run automated systems. However, this has caused a shift away from production jobs, which make for generally more stable economies if i'm not mistaken. Service economies (toward which we lean, in the US) take a beating in hard times. Also keep in mind that many tech-type production jobs are and have long been based in Japan, Korea, Thailand, etc.

Outsourcing is a big concern, too. In streamlining for maximum profitability, companies are shipping jobs out of the US en masse. They're even
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on how to most efficiently profit from countries which do not yet have the same worker protections in place as the US.

According to a
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last year on corporate outsourcing, "The companies cut their work forces in the U.S. by 2.9 million during the 2000s while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million, new data from the U.S. Commerce Department show."

[hide=graphic]
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[/hide]

Included in this figure are many monolithic multinationals such as "General Electric, Caterpillar, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, Chevron, Cisco, Intel, Stanley Works, Merck, United Technologies, and Oracle."

From the video about the article: "the one thing that's worrisome is that unless these firms invest in hiring in the United states, we are not going to have enough good jobs to put people back to work and sustain the middle class."

It also bears noting that companies, when deciding whether to hire in the US, consider our slipping education standards and aging infrastructure, along with financial incentives. The GOP would have you believe that cutting taxes (and infrastructure) to zero is the solution, but taxes are lower now than they were for a very long time, including US ascendancy. Improving support for many public (omg socialist) programs will go a long way toward making us competitive again.

Unrelated to the above reasons: there are also the public sector jobs vanishing under GOP axes, as larkin said above. As far as i can understand, this isn't a product of anything but Republican hatred for all products and services that are readily available even to those without wads of cash. "If it's not on a private, for-profit basis, then fuck it. We should be able to turn away those who can't pay large sums for safety, security, health, etc."

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	Originally Posted by themuzicman To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
	What we need to figure out is that we need to lower the cost to hire an employee.

Autumnleaf already has proposed an idea i'm sure any fine upstanding Republican would like:

	Originally Posted by Autumnleaf To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
	Modernizing the American work force would involve getting them used to being grateful to work for 25 cents an hour without any benefits.