[QUOTE=Evil Captor]
I don’t think Sam Stone is much of a conservative any more.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t think he ever was, except in the eyes of folks such as yourself.
Yeah, because liberalism and reality are synonymous. Or so I keep hearing around these parts. 
Sadly the converse is not true. But then, you are already on the side of truth, justice and the American way and so don’t need to shift your positions, them being innately correct and all. 
-XT
Yes, we can see how well that has worked out for America with regard to such international markets as China, right?
Not necessarily. You need people with income that they can, and want, to spend on whatever it is you provide.
It can be basic necessities or existing luxuries or totally new inventions. Your basic requirement is still people who are willing and able to spend money on what you’re providing.
[QUOTE=ratatoskK]
I didn’t hear the interview but I totally agree with the quote. The whole world economy is changing. But my question is, since we have e permanent job shortage why do corporations keep saying they have to import cheap workers from abroad? Whenever they talk about this they make it sound like Americans are lazy or something.
[/QUOTE]
Do you have a cite showing that ‘they’ are saying Americans are lazy ‘or something’? AFIAK, the issue is that American labor is over priced for the value it adds. If you can get some person in another country to work for a few dollars an hour and do the same work as an American worker getting $30/hour (plus benefits) then it says something about relative costs.
I’m unsure what the OP thinks is the solution here. Let’s assume that the problem is structural (as ‘liberal economics types on the Dope’ have been saying :dubious:). Ok, what’s to be done? Automation has rendered it unnecessary to have large numbers of employees to anymore. So, what’s to be done about that? Force companies to hire more people than they need anyway? Tax the rich to make up the difference? Spur business and investors to create new businesses and new sectors that would hire the idle workers? How?
-XT
Wow, talk about reading into something.
Yes, thanks to technology, we don’t need as many people to make a widget as we used to. That is not screwing someone over, that is using technology. People getting screwed personally is a side effect.
Example: Compare the Port of Hong Kong to the Port of Los Angeles. In Hong Kong, all of the loading and off loading is controlled with a very high tech system of stacking, sorting and tracking containers as they come in from parts of China, to be sent to the US. They have a control tower that looks like it came off of the enterprise. Trucks pull up to a line in the road, and the cranes automatically life the container and stack it, based on an algorithm that determines when that container is being shipped out.
In Los Angeles, they still use chalk boards in some places. The desire to upgrade with computers and reduce the number of workers resulted in the longshoreman strike.
So China figured out how to do the same job faster and more efficiently with fewer people. That is what has been going on since the industrial revolution, and will continue to go on. Certain types of jobs are made to be supplemented with technology, reducing the people you need.
That is not worker exploitation, there is no desire to actively screw the worker, it is just business. I work in software. Our system takes a certain task typically undertaken by a team of 5, and makes it possible to run it with a team of 2. Am I engaged in screwing people? The CEO here is not a sociopath, nor is our firm. We found a need, and we will fill a need, and many of us are making amazing money doing it (with time left over for the Dope).
[QUOTE=Evil Captor]
Yes, we can see how well that has worked out for America with regard to such international markets as China, right?
[/QUOTE]
Um, it’s worked pretty well despite China’s increasing reluctance to import stuff from anywhere, including the US. US exports to China have risen steadily over the past decade and IIRC, China is one of the largest export partners the US has right now. And it will only continue to climb, especially if the Chinese ever get their heads out of their asses and realize that their current path is unsustainable.
-XT
Not only competition from China, but technology advancement.
Take the steel industry-in the 1950’s a steel mill employed thousands of workers. Now, a modern mill gets by with a few hundred.
Along with this, we have the phenomenon of poor kids rejecting education…in the past, there were plenty of “pick and shovel” jobs…for men without skills or education.
And I also think the skilled trades are going to see a similar jobs collapse-take plumbers.
There is a current shortage of plumbers-lots of young men don’t want the job (they consider it dirty and low class).
Now, plastic plumbing is displacing copper pipes-and it can be put together by most people with modest skills.
Thinks are not looking good for the American labor force.
Worker insecurity is great for corporations. You can offer less benefits, lower pay, and the constant threat of the entire company or division up and moving to some developing nation suppresses union activity and keeps the worker bees in line. Paying people money to do a job is a necessary evil, a part of doing business, and not something they do out of the goodness of their heart.
Are the Friedman types still pushing the line that everyone is going to transfer to the service sector or that we’ll have an ‘information’ economy? You know, everyone will work at a salon or a burger joint or the internets.
The solution is dissolution.
Failing that, the eventual solution will be a new equilibrium. Why do Americans think they deserve to get paid 10x more than Chinese or Indian people? Is it simple racism? No matter, it’s time for everyone to get knocked down a peg. And this isn’t just including useless workers like ditch diggers, Walmart greeters, or CEOs. Engineers, doctors, and lawyers will join in the fun too.
Technological advance in a given industry would generally seem to lead towards less labor needed. Surely this can’t be a proposition in serious dispute.
By fortunate happenstance, other industries have come along that didn’t exist, creating entirely new jobs and balancing out the loss of the old ones. So the introduction of robotics means that the auto assembly line needs half as many people as it did a generation ago… but at the same time, assembling microchip boards in a clean room, an industry that didn’t exist before, now needs workers – and without them, there will be no robotic arms working on the auto assembly line.
But there’s no law of nature that suggests this balance is sustainable in the future, or that it should be forced into being simply because people need jobs.
You mean we need to make a living wage?:dubious:
They want to make X times as much because it costs X times as much to live here compared to China or India.
People want enough to survive.
And no it’s not racism. Don’t even try that. You’re not going to win an argument around here by pulling out a phony race card.
[QUOTE=ratatoskK]
You mean we need to make a living wage?
[/QUOTE]
Um, no…I didn’t mean that. What I meant to say is ‘AFIAK, the issue is that American labor is over priced for the value it adds.’. Oh…wait…that IS what I said. So, I meant to say exactly what I said, and it didn’t talk about ‘living wage’ at all.
-XT
Companies of any type exist to make money. If they hire people just to “do good”, they will quickly not exist because losing money = closed company.
If people want jobs, they need to have the skills that companies require. Just like companies need to fulfill a demand with what they sell. Right now, there is simply no demand for unskilled, high paid labor. What too many liberal politicians cannot understand is that you can’t simply create jobs by fiat. You want manufacturing jobs back in this country? You can have them if you eliminate minimum wage laws and lose a lot of the regulation.
Don’t want to do that? OK. Then those companies that need un/semi skilled workers will get them in places that will. It is cheaper to import the goods than pay American labor costs.
So what would you rather have? Five people making $3 an hour or five people making nothing because their jobs are overseas? You can talk about a “living wage” all you want, but forcing companies to pay it just means more people out of work. You might also want to consider that the cost of living is more here BECAUSE of higher costs due to government regulation.
It sounds harsh, but it is just reality.
Pretty much. I don’t know the exact stats, but I believe productivity is about the same as it was before the recession but the workforce (number of workers and hours worked) is about 10% lower. There is no incentive to hire, either you can produce with fewer workers or there isn’t enough demand to justify it. And even if you still have a job you don’t have as much leverage anymore since you can’t move from job to job or threaten to quit like you could in the past.
So yeah, we are screwed over the short/medium term as far as I can tell. Labor has too few jobs and no real clout to demand better working conditions/payments. I don’t see why that would change.
I’m guessing overseas purchases will increase demand. But I really don’t know what happens with the country since employers don’t really need as many workers anymore.
There is a tremendous oversupply of lawyers-and more garduating every year.
My question: how are they still able to command fees of >$300/hour?
Doesn’t a larger supply eaqual lower wages?
Do you have a cite for the inelasticity? I know many attorneys who have put out their own shingle and will do work for much less than the typical corporate rates (I use two different ones for contracts, for example).
The issue here, I think, is that these people are not being replaced by technology that forms the basis of a new industry. An office of 20 decides to lay off one worker and distribute the workload to the remaining 19. Voila, productivity goes up because you’re squeezing more from each worker, but there’s nothing new in the economy for the laid off worker to do. Another office has 19 people, and has enough work to justify hiring one more, but they don’t, because of economic uncertainty, again, high productivity, but not due to technology.
Now, you can only squeeze people for so long before they pop, so we can expect this to come to equilibrium sometime, but it may take a while.
Yes, and that’s precisely what happens. It’s not every lawyer that gets to bill at $300/hr.
It’s just for starting lawyers, but here’s some statistics on what a starting lawyer’s salary might be.
So, while the ‘average’ starting salary might be $80 or $90k, there’s a split with many (most?) graduating lawyers will be working $50k jobs - along with all that law school debt - while a few gets those plush corporate gigs with the extortionate billing hours.
It’s the difference between getting a high-powered corporate attorney or the local family law guy practicing out of a mini-mall. We focus on the corporate lawyers, but most attorneys are basically average Joes/Janes.
It’s like comparing the pay for a journeyman actor starring as Guy B in a Ben-Gay commercial with Brad Pitt. Sure, Brad Pitt gets mega-bucks, but the vast majoriy of actors don’t.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, have never been a lawyer, and never intend to become a lawyer.
As I see it there are three ways to handle a 10% increase in capacity.
Produce 10% more widgets which you sell to people.
Result: prices of widgets goes down; more people get more widgets (yippee!); factory owners profit goes up from selling more widgets (yippee!)
Produce the same number of widgets but have 10% of the workforce idle.
Result: wages go down as demand for labor decreases (grumble grumble); profits go up for individual companies as labor demand increase (yippee!), but then slide back down for the economy as a whole as demand decreases and we fall into recession (grumble grumble); additional capital required to maintain welfare (grumble grumble).
Keep the same labor force bu reduce hours by 10%
Results: Supply of widgets and labor maintains the same state; no real change except people have more leisure time to spend with their widgets (yippee!). Corporate profits stay steady (grumble grumble)
I think in the past we have tried to follow path one, but since there are only so many widgets a person can use, we have largely devolved into path two. Ideally I think we would be best following path three as this seems the most logical and sustainable way to absorb additional man hours (actually using labor saving devices to save labor) but I’m not sure how we get from here to there.
The nature of the free market is to move towards short term local maxima for an individual company, rather than long term global maxima for the economy as a whole. We would somehow need to convince the country/'world that a standard work week should naturally be 35 hours, rather than the 40 hours we take for granted now.
http://www1.salary.com/Attorney-I-salary.html It is a Bell curve, but lawyers make soon out of school and average of over 88 K.