?
Medicare is for those aged 65 or those with a disability or end-stage renal disease.
And this just started happening in 2008?
I find it pretty amazing that this remarkable new phenomenon just starting taking place in the United States three years ago. After all, until early 2008, there’s no evidence at all that technology was reducing the necessary number of workers.
Then suddenly in 2008, the unemployment rate jumped.
I wonder… did all this job-killing technology get invented in mid-2008? Or was there maybe something else that happened? Hmmmm.
This reminds me of people in the late 90s who were going on about how the economy had changed and it wasn’t going to be the same. You know, when the NASDAQ was at 4000. When a phase of a cycle lasts for a few years, many will mistake it for a permanent change.
In the early 90s, I wasn’t watching the news much, being in elementary school, did that same nonsense get much play back then? Machines will take all our jobs, an Asian country will get all our manufacturing and we’ll be living in a third world country?
I do know that Ross Perrot was going on about how NAFTA was going to wreck the country in the '92 election and that economist Jeremy Rifkin wrote a book called The end of work in 1995. Was there more of that type of stuff?
90s? Hell, people were saying this in the 70s. They were talking about how industrial robots and/or the Japanese would create a permanent underclass. Unemployment would be 50% by 1985 and there was no way to stop it. It was exactly the same stuff.
Yep. This was a major topic of discussion in college dorm room bull sessions when I was there in the early 1980’s. Gloom and doom about how there would be vast armies of unemployed workers within 15 years because of automation.
Homes are the only item the average American deals with that is not currently produced with automation. But with the advent of Pex and Sharkbite plumbing, PVC drains, poke-in wiring, etc. they take much less labor to finish. Framing is still mostly built on-site, but items like roof trusses are pre-assembled and shipped in, and the framing it’s self is made far more quickly with power nail guns.
The resistance to manufactured homes will fade in a generation once building codes are modified in enough communities (which is what made newer plumbing and electrical techniques acceptable). The whole point of a sub-division is to build a bunch of homes and only paying for one set of blueprints.
In short, invest in manufactured homes over the long run. Principally automated factories built on the outskirts of a new subdivision producing room modules which are pre-wired and plumbed, stacked on-site. And employing a tiny fraction of the amount of labor currently employed to build the same number of homes today.
That technology has been around for a long time. The major thing that’s stopping it is regulatory capture - the construction industry has managed to manipulate building codes in ways that force home construction to be done in the most labor-intensive ways possible.
A couple of decades ago, a university in conjunction with a manufacturer developed the ‘home of the 21st century’. The thing was made of walls that were extruded plastic with wiring and plumbing built in and filled with expanded insulation. You could order modules from a catalog, and in the right combinations you could make a house that looked absolutely traditional in any number of floorplans and designs. The modules could have been mass produced, and once assembled the home was maintenance-free, extremely well insulated, and would probably last forever. They were talking about a revolution in the way we house people.
The project died because they discovered there was no way to navigate the myriad building codes across the various states and provinces - codes were often contradicted each other so there was no commonality. One example I remember was that one state’s codes disallowed any sort of press-fit connections, and required everything to be connected with screws, solder, welds, whatever. It was essentially written to protect the jobs of plumbers and electricians. And since every state was different, the startup company would have had to re-fight massive regulatory battles state-to-state - regulations most often by the very people who would lose their jobs if they were changed.
There’s no technological barrier to better housing. It’s all about turf wars and jobs and regulations.
City by city, state by state, the regulations are changing. Press-fit electrical is the standard now, press-fit plumbing will be the standard eventually.
Did you miss my point, which is that housing is the only bespoke item in the life of the average American? That Great Antibob was using as an example an anomaly, the single thing in their lives that is not mass-produced?
There is no reason to doubt that the codes will change and be standardized and mass-produced housing will become the default.
I’d like to be as optimistic as you, but every one of those regulations has a special interest behind it. And many of those special interests are heavily intertwined with state and municipal governments. I think it will be the mother of all fights to enforce uniform national standards that result in the obsoleting of armies of drywallers, framers, electricians, plumbers, et al. These people are unionized and connected to the levers of power. Good luck.
Don’t be an ass. I am referring to a real job that can be done permanently, not a mobile feast that wanders where the money goes and poofs in the winter. A real job, factory or office and not a mcjob slinging burgers. We have enough service side economy, we need production back in the country. Or do you expect the country to exist by everybody servicing everybody else directly, I sling you a burger, you sell me shoes? Might as well have the government turn into one of the dystopian novels and run everything, and issue everybody an apartment and an ID that is used in the stores, and the government is the entire employer of the country and the population is leveled at subsistance.
And the damned WW2 generation had all the top jobs and all the money and they weren’t retiring like they should!
Optimistic? Huh?
I’m describing the way we will wind up in either a utopia or a distopia. Right now the building trades produce a good number of decent paying jobs, but due to technological advances and increased “productivity” only a fraction of the number of jobs it used to.
For instance, wallboard. I’ve been renovating one of my brother’s rental houses. When it was built, the standard wall construction technique was plaster lathe. Thin 1" wide strips of wood were nailed perpendicularly to the wall studs Each would have a 1/4" space between them - and it was all nailed manually. Then cement was hand troweled onto the wood strips, called lathe. After that was dry, successive layers of plaster would be troweled on. After it is dry, and remaining roughness would be sanded down. The smoothness of the wall was entirely due to the skill of the craftsman.
With wallboard, 4’ x 8’ sheets are attached to the studs, usually with power screwguns. Then plaster coated paper tape is used to cover the seams between the board. After that drys, the more plaster is troweled over the paper and eventually sanded. The vast majority of the wall surface is smooth by default, and the plasterer only deals with a small percentage of the surface. No lathe, no hammers, no concrete. And the work is accomplished in a fraction of the time with a fraction of the labor.
This is skilled, honorable work, like carpentry, plumbing, electrical, roofing, etc. It has provided a living that could support a family and provided enough income for children to go to college and advance.
Men like Henry Ford understood that in order to sell cars, he not only had to price them well, he had to pay a wage that would allow the men building them to afford them.
But the current generation of corporate executives don’t seem to understand this. They assume that someone else will produce the jobs, that they can keep automating and outsourcing, increasing “productivity”.
We are on the path of unemployment growing and growing. Is a capitalist system capable of handling permanent 20% unemployment? 30%? 40%?
Henry Ford paid good wages to attract good workers. The “so my workers can afford them” line was good PR, but obviously the Ford Motor Company could not make money selling only to its own employees.
And it’s kind of strange to then say this…
… when you were just praising Henry Ford, who was a pioneer in the automation and productivity advancements of the age.
Low productivity doesn’t create jobs.
Rick, income for the middle class has been stagnant for decades. That’s because productivity has been going up for decades. If there were any kind of competition for workers, you’d think that middle class and lower class incomes, which come almost exclusively from wages, would be higher. But they are not.
If you are suggesting Obama’s election is the problem, I really don’t know what to say, except, “that’s just sad.”
This is a substantially different claim from saying that technology is causing unemployment, though.
Are you joking? Seriously? You can’t think of another rather dramatic event that occurred in 2008 that might have something to do with the unemployment rate?
Hint: Two words. Starts with “L” and ends in “s”.
Dude, I’m not the one who needs the hint.
Actually, you could also say it starts with F and ends in S, or starts with B and ends in S, or… well, it was kind of a big news item.
http://www.alternet.org/story/151999/meet_the_global_financial_elites_controlling_%2446_trillion_in_wealth/
Deloitte Accounting has done an analysis of American wealth. US millionaires households have reached an unprecedented degree of wealth. They say they have 38.6 trillion dollars of wealth. They have another 6.3 trillion in offshore accounts. With the trends in place due to our stupid tax structure, they will increase 20 percent to 87.1 trillion by 2020.
That is a problem.
Don’t trust an article that can’t do basic math.
A quick look at the article will show you that it was a simple copying error: the correct number is 225%. So, nit unpicked sir.
As for your remark about the 2008 event … the housing market peaked in 2005-6, and things got worse thereafter. I did not think there was a Date Certain fixed for the event … certainly not one to be found in this Wiki article: