People refer to that as “the new normal”.
Anything is possible, but that scenario is unlikely. The shift of manufacturing jobs to low cost nations have been going on for a long time-- this is nothing new. The financial instruments that cause the banking crisis, and the subsequent crash are relatively new. And the real estate bubble, which was based on the crazy idea that real estate would not decline in value, wasn’t caused by outsourcing. It was caused by a credit industry run wild.
We have had two gigantic bubbles that made it look like we have real economic growth (albeit with the gains in income going to the highest income groups). First the dot com bubble (the world is changing, the old rules are out the window, jettision the old paradigm of employment and value creation!) and then the real estate bubble. There was a shallow recession between these two “booms” but neither of the booms was real.
In the late 1990s we all got rich (including the government) by selling things back and forth to each other. In the 2002-2007 time frame we all got rich bidding up the values on each others houses. In both cases our increasing consumption was really financed by borrowing from countries who actually produced the physical and psychic goods we consumed.
Part of the reason the credit industry “ran wild” was that there was all this money coming in from the people who we had paid for the stuff we were consuming (clothing, electronics, cars, appliances, even income tax preparation) turning around and buying the only thing we had to sell. IOUs. This made the interest rates on IOUs really low. So we could borrow even more, consume even more. A lot of us even “made money” on the transactions and spent 103% of that too. And the Chinese, Indians and Germans were more than happy to sell to us, take the money, buy more securities. Everyone was happy. Even the schlub whose wages were falling, made money on his house, so he wasn’t too pissed either. He could consume even more than he could when he was earning more money. He just treated his bank as an ATM.
Madoff was just the most naked form of what was going on. A lot of the wealth that was created in the 1990s and 2000s was never real. It wasn’t earned by people making anything (and I don’t just mean physical goods) that anyone wanted to consume.
Interesting. So, neither boom was ‘real’? It was all just smoke and mirrors? You don’t actually use Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter or things like message boards or high speed internet in your day to day life? All fake? That’s…really interesting.
I wish we could discuss this in some sort of electronic media, but that would necessitate high speed internet connections and hosted message boards using modern telco. If you will enclose a stamp we can continue this discussion anon…
You have a very similar outlook as the OP. So, one might question why those countries continue to sell us goods on borrowed money, since it is counter intuitive to loan someone your money to buy stuff from you, especially if they have no value and make nothing or add nothing themselves. What are your thoughts as to why this seemingly inconsistent state of affairs has gone on since the '90’s…which, correct me if I’m wrong, was over a decade ago (nearly 2). Are other countries simply stupid, or is this part of some master plan?
Interesting. Again, the obvious question would be…why? Why would they be happy to sell to us, take the money, then give it back to us so we could buy more? Especially in light of your assertion that all our economic strength and gains were pure illusion with no substance. Can you explain?
Well, they were until you just pointed out that they have been really stupid to sell us stuff then give us the money back for no apparent reason! Man, they are going to be pissed now! Sheesh…why did you have to let the cat out of the bag??
Probably because ‘he’ wasn’t in the majority would be my guess, at least not until recently. Over that time period ‘he’ made more gains than losses, at least overall. Obviously there were exceptions…come to think of it, I’m one of those exceptions, as I make substantially less today than I made at my peak in 2000.
Right…‘he’ could do this because of those countries like China pumping back in a substantial amount of what they made into our system, which allowed the credit industry to get completely out of control. Which is what John was saying, right?
-XT
GDP per capita: US $45,900. Sweden $35,900 Germany $34,300
I only wish we could cut our GDP per capita by a 1/4 to catch up to Sweden and Germany.
We are creating relatively well paying jobs in India and China, in fact for every job lost here, we have probably created several jobs in India and China. I thought you knew that.
Germany retains a lot of heavy industry. How do you think they do that? Do you think they out-compete everyone else? Or do you think there might be something else to it?
I don’t know which capitalist apologists you’ve been listening to, but domestic manufacturing has been increasing since Q3 2009. US manufacturers have been managing to do more with less. Or are you saying we should force manufacturers to hire more workers to sit around and do nothing?
I think they have oriented themselves into a vertical niche market of high quality high value goods and services, trading on the German mystique (warranted) for high quality manufactured goods and high end engineering skills and ability. That’s what I think. What about you? Why do you think the Germans have been successful in their niche fields?
-XT
So 6 million Americans have to be jobless perhaps permanently in order to fulfill your fantasy about engendering racism against American workers to end some imaginary racism against (pick your foreign peoples here)?
And they will lose them if we as a nation go under.
If our standards of living decline, then your precious poor put-upon third world workers will have no one to export to.
Like Hellestal you refuse to consider that aspect.
So your argument is to make us poor in order to provide for your poor.
There’s only so much your poor can get out of milking us dry. When we can no longer support you… what will you have them? Mass starvation, that’s what.
It’s not. The sheer number of long term unemployed people - to say nothing of the underemployed and short term unemployed people - are creating a self sustaining drag on the economy.
It’s killing businesses and decimating our standard of living.
A massive boom? That is flatly untrue.
It was a false boom, marked by job growth that did not even keep up with working class population growth.
It was a false boom, marked by wages that did not keep up with inflation.
It was a false boom, marked by exploding ranks of the poor and a shrinking middle class.
It was a false boom, in that it was fueled by skyrocketing national and consumer debt.
Not that anyone will ever answer this, but…
What would have happened to that imaginary “boom” that you speak of if consumer lending laws had been back then what they are becoming now?
Really? Look at the graph. I’ve got 6 million reasons to say you’re wrong.
So when our knowledge based work can be produced less expensively elsewhere and it starts migrating overseas
oh wait, it already has, silly me!
then what will you have to say?
Oh, I know… our time has come and gone? So we’re supposed to sink beneath the waves in the name of capitalism? Who in the world accepts that? Humans and nations like to survive, you know. That’s a bigger imperative than protecting capitalism.
Ah, like I said. The roots of Social Darwinism.
So your response to the millions of unemployed out there and the total lack of creation in the “creative destruction” meme is… die, sucker, die?
And as you’ve shown many times you’re free to dodge and also ignore such challenges.
We don’t have the consumer spending levels to sustain any kind of great recovery. The credit boom is over, remember? Doesn’t anyone here realize that the last boom was fueled in large part by credit card usage and home equity loan patterns that can no longer be engaged in?
We’re about to settle into European-level patterns of unemployment with permanently displaced workers. 8% minimum.
And that’s before skyrocketing oil prices catch up with us, and before employers realize that they can hire knowledge based economy workers elsewhere for less than they pay for it here.
Strong tariffs against low-wage nations to protect the newest (knowledge-based, for now) industry jobs.
Moderate tariffs against low-wage nations for last-generation stuff like tech and manufacturing.
Because, frankly speaking, when you tell us that we’re supposed to let old jobs go so we can put people to work in new jobs, you are ignoring the fact that what we’re actually doing is kicking people out of old industry jobs and putting them on the soup line.
There ain’t enough new industry jobs for them. There never will be.
So reality dictates to you a question:
Do you want 6 million working old industry jobs or standing on the soup line?
Or maybe you fell that their “time has come” like one other poster here has said?
Now, I’m going to ask this again… if this is all about creative destruction then for those 6 million long term unemployed what are we creating?
How about move those jobs from Mexico and China that are producing things for America, back to America.
Or we can just wait until things crash and workers in Mexico and China starve to death because our spending levels collapse.
Remember, we put 20 million Chinese out of work in 2008 because our wallets ran dry. If we keep this up we’ll do it again.
It wasn’t just outsourcing. Increased employee productivity has also reduced the need for workers, without creating new jobs in the process. Other than that, for a layman you sure hit one hell of a distant bullseye.
Where on earth did you get the idea that a recession was “creative destruction”?
Creative destruction is good old fashioned competition where one guy’s “creation” results in better products or services and that results in another guy’s “destruction” if that guy can’t improve his own products or services.
The internet, which you are using at this very moment, is in the process of “creatively destroying” a lot of print media. Newspapers and magazines have to scramble to survive in a world where more and more people get their news and info on the internet.
Recession do often kill off weaker companies, but that’s a whole different dynamic. Create Destruction can and does happen in the boomingest of boom times. Really good companies can thrive on Creative Destruction within their own product lines.
I wasn’t just talking about this recession.
Read between the lines with that graph - the very evolution of our economy is toward a state which is not creating jobs.
The severe hardship problem is no longer short term.
The job market has been rotting from the inside since at least 2001, with anemic job growth and wages lagging behind inflation (except for the very rich). In fact, it may even have been in this deteriorating state a decade before that. All that growth you saw was because of skyrocketing consumer debt. It was false growth. This last crash was little more than the truth coming home to roost.
The continually innovating economy is not creating enough opportunities to absorb the current number of entrants into the workforce much less the ones that are long term unemployed to say nothing of the rest who are unemployed (what, 17 million so far?) or underemployed. You wish to say I’m wrong? Well then, what would happen if all of the 6 million unemployed people today went and got knowledge industry college degrees? How many jobs will be available for them now? What does the BLS say will be available for them by 2014? 2018? Do you even want to know what this portends for the 17 million total who are now unemployed?
What is this creative destruction creating for them?
Answer: a game of musical chairs. The continually innovating economy is making it so that we need fewer and fewer workers in relation to our growing populace. THAT is the legacy of creative destruction.
Wow, if I could fdefine the perfect economy for the US, at current population levels of say,. 380 million, working age, lets say 270 million, I would consider 6 Million people between jobs , not even 3%, as terrific! From such people come retrained workforces, people able to move into new types of jobs that didn’t exist before, innovators, entrepreneurs, etc. Nothing on earth runs at full capacity for long, there always has to be some slack in the system to keep it running full time.
Similarly, there will be jobs that will go unfilled too, no matter what.
Labor mobility requires both conditions, and unless you advocate workers not being able to change jobs, which I don’t think you do, then you are going to have some unemployment at any given time, and some jobs that are open at any given time evn while people are unemployed.
No they won’t, should we “go under” then something will replace us, 400 million people aren’t going to disappear should our sovereignty change. Countries come and go elsewhere all the time, the people and some economy stay.
And to the extent the demand changes, then the suppliers will adapt. So what?
The whole rest of the world? Or their product mix will change, just like ours is changing?
Why do you think the particular snapshot in time you want to preserve like a museum of economy is the right or best one to choose I wonder?
Funny that you won’t consider the alternative approach I suggested at the top of the thread.
Or, less out of the box, how about we focus on what we (the US) does best, and scale it up? We are best at inventing efficient processes and products and services, so why not focus on making sure as many people as possible are educated sufficiently to contribute to that moving forward, so as a whole we can do what we do best with a larger, more capable workforce, and fewer folks we need to carry along because they can’t or won’t participate in what we do best?
I agree and have been saying so since Reagan was President through many cycles now. But the solution is not to force people into factories for nearly obsolete products we can get elsewhere for less, because what do you do with the factories and the staff once the products are obsolete?
Except we are already inventing new and higher value knowledge work. What we have sent overseas is low value stuff, the equivalent of sewing sneakers together 20 years ago. There is no secret or special skill needed, it is hardly knowledge work.
Managing it efficiently is, and for now at least, we still do that best.
Just like Nike is still in the US, because the value in the sneaker on the open market is not the overseas labor that goes into it, it is the nearly invisible knowledge and innovation around inventing, managing, marketing, distributing, and that all happens in the US.
Oh, I know… our time has come and gone? So we’re supposed to sink beneath the waves in the name of capitalism? Who in the world accepts that? Humans and nations like to survive, you know. That’s a bigger imperative than protecting capitalism.
I don’t know about the person you are responding to, but mine would be to “learn baby, learn” or “innovate baby innovate”, your choice.
I take on your challenges, but you have ignored my posts. Wonder why?
There is plenty of unlocked value in our economy to be extracted in the short term, much of it will require labor, and it will prepare us for the next phase after that. Re-engineering no longer efficient enough energy/power structures and deliveries for one thing.
The newest knowledge based jobs are not going anywhere except to places like Silcon Valley in the US. Old Silicon Valley type jobs are getting pushed out, but that has always been the case since the days of “The Valley of the Heart’s Delight” when Stanford started building railroads and betting if horses run with all 4 hooves off the ground or not.
Except that new jobs are coming to replace many of them, if people are willing to be re-educated, and possibly flexible about location. You are arguing that no such jobs will ever come, and that is simply silly. The American work force has always been pretty flexible on eduction levels, and on internal migration to follow new industries and opportunities. Are you arguing that any of this has changed?
You mean 6 million people working in factories building products no one wants or needs?
That’s a fair question, but are you open-minded enough to consider the answer? To think out of the box? If so, perhaps consider my post at the top of the thread for one approach.
“Read between the lines with that graph” is just another way of saying: I get to say whatever I want, and I don’t have to back it up with actual data. The data is “between the lines”.
No thanks.
Because most of the added value has gone into private equity instead of being re-invested/re-distributed as we traditionally have, to support longer term groiwth and change. You may have noticed Washington debating the value of extending this policy at this very moment.
No, the earlier growth was about the creative destruction initiated by the commercialization of the internet. Suddenly every tom dick and harry was a knowledge worker, especially a web designer. Either that, or like Levi Strauss ogf an earlier era, they sold goods and services to those who were.
Lot of those whose jobs seemed like important knowledge workers, like many web designers who were not so good, later found that others around the world also learned the same basic skills, and were willing to provide that service cheaper. So they went back to their prior service jobs for the most part.
Yet it did from ~1995-2001 with a vengeance.
A lot of them would end up in innovative jobs! That;s a big issue, not only lack of educatin overall in the US, but lack of engineers in the right areas. India and China are much larger countries than we are, and they graduate far far more engineers than we do. We simply have to do a better job at this.
But because we really don’t want middle to low quality engineers, we have to be honest early on about who and how we are going to educate. We can’t compete on numbers of rank and file engineers with those countries or the rest of the world,no matter what. But we can compete on the smaller number of top engineers we need, the appropriate management, and the related skills and services that are needed which we can use more people in the middle levels of quality, such as marketing and sales.
Zillions according to the job boards I am on. Far more than people with the right skills exist, truth be told.
They will work for restaurants, dry cleaners, retail, and related distribution, etc. as they did duding the boom years of 1998-2001. Even at the peak in Silicon Valley, there was always room for unskilled or mid-skilled workers outside of tech in many other sectors. 4 million in the Bay Area at that time, not all of them were knowledge workers by a long shot. Don’t know for sure, but probably not even 35% by my WAG.
Support jobs in lots of other sectors?
Maybe, maybe not. I am not sure.
But I am convinced that we can innovate our way to both more jobs, and a better system for capturing some of the value created for re-investment in an economy with a smoother system of ebbs and flows.
Even though that number of long term unemployed represents the worst we’ve seen in decades?
Retrained for what?
If all 6 million people retrain, there’s still not enough jobs for them.
What are these new types of jobs that didn’t exist before?
6 million people (actually, 17 million) are asking you right now, what about just being able to get a job, period?
And for the 17 million jobless Americans out there right now how does this put food on the table?
Especially when employers are very clearly saying in no uncertain terms that they do not want to hire the unemployed?
You know, the last time a country our size (in relation to the rest of the world) went under, we had a Dark Ages.
So what if we throw a minimum of 6 million people under the bus, eh?
The whole rest of the world can’t afford what we can. Look at their per capita income. Try going from relying on America as an export market to relying on Russia as an export market. Please. That’s called a drastic drop in growth.
Do some math. Compare the American consumer market with any other in the world. Imagine what happens if ours continues its decline.
What alternative?
Not happening. As soon as we try, employers will send the work out to countries with cheaper labor.
There’ll never be enough jobs if we take all of our current unemployed and train them in those fields.
There is no “won’t” with our workforce. They’re scrambling for whatever is out there. Problem is there are 5 people fighting for every 1 job opening.
Do me some math, will you. With 5 people competing for 1 job opening how many must go without a job?
You mean cars are nearly obsolete? Computers are nearly obsolete? Really? I didn’t know that. Wow.
So your plan is to drive 17 million Americans even further into college debt training for so-called next generation jobs only for (and I’m being gosh darned generous here) half of them to be able to get work by 2020?
What do we do with the other half? Tell them “hey things are good enough, we’re producing computers but they’re nearly obsolete!”
And sending it out of the country as fast as it’s being created.
You mean like software programming, and biotech research? You call that low-value? Really?
You spend 5 minutes in a biotech lab and tell me that’s hardly knowledge work.
You can hire managers cheaply outside the country.
Correction: its corporate execs are still here.
The one thing you keep forgetting about knowledge based industries is anyone around the world can acquire the knowledge and innovation skills.
Look what Japan did to us in the auto industry. Who’s the master of innovation there? That’s a taste of things to come.
That graph is clearly showing you the results of all that innovation.
We’re innovating millions of Americans out of work.
What posts?
Ok so where are these jobs? How many of them are there? We’ve got 17 million unemployed Americans. If they retrain for this right now will even a QUARTER of them get jobs?
Only a handful of jobs are popping up in Silicon Valley.
As I said, if you successfully retrained every unemployed American for the number of Silicon Valley job openings that there are, what percentage would get a job?
Where at? We’re not even producing enough jobs for the new entrants into the workforce.
The numbers clearly disagree with you. Show where these new jobs are keeping up. I say they’re not. Show me.
BZZZZZZT.
I’m arguing that they won’t be sufficient to support the growing workforce, much less the 6 million long term unemployed, or the total of 17 million people now jobless.
Let’s not even get into the underemployed.
It sure is. Since I never said that.
I’m arguing that the growth of the American work force population is outpacing job growth.
Statistics show (and I’ve posted this a thousand times) this has been the case for close to the last 10 years.
You’re right. You got me.
No one wants or needs computers. No one wants or needs cars.
You mean when you wrote this? I don’t see any posts before this.
You just made my point and took it right to the endgame.
We are turning a point in our economy where we don’t need as many workers. That means a LOT of people are going to go without work.
Well, according to the capitalists, we cut the “cash poor” loose. Anything else is redistribution of wealth.
That was then, this is now.
As I said, 1995-2001 is a part of that false growth fueled largely by rising consumer debt. Let me put it to you this way - if people’s access to refinancing and consumer debt was then what it is in 2010, 1995-2001 would have not have looked anything NEARLY as cheerful as it did…
Define a lot. The entire country is failing to produce enough jobs to take in new entrants to the workforce. The ENTIRE COUNTRY.
And you’ve made another point for me.
If you’re not at the top 1% of your class should you just resign yourself to the unemployment line?
Basic math question for you: if you have 6 million American workers looking for a job, how many of these people can graduate at the top 10% of the field they’re pursuing? Anyone care to answer that?
Absolutely, positively and demonstrably UNTRUE and you know that. Post up the figures. How many of those jobs are there? Give us some numbers. You know full well that what you just said was dead wrong.
EXACTLY!!! Dammit, people, I post words like “bifurcation” for a reason.
It means that the economy is dividing into very high paying jobs on one end and very LOW PAYING jobs on the other end, and the jobs in the middle are disappearing.
The process of creative destruction has put 17 million Americans out of work and is set to create a bunch of low paying support jobs with a handful of high paying jobs.
Good luck with that fantasy, not_alice.
Cash-rich corporations are holding onto their money and investing in increasing efficiency to get rid of more workers. Everyone who’s anyone is researching ways to do more with fewer. Workers are considered an unnecessary evil, a drag on profits. Just ask any CEO.
Even you said:
There is no getting out of that death spiral. If you aren’t rich and you don’t have a job you die. The only way out of this is to see millions simply drop off the radar for good. As I said, social darwinism.
Lets be fair here, a 1 USD a day wage goes a lot farther in Indonesia than Manhattan.
Sure, because in my “perfect economy” those would just be people on the side waiting to get back in, everyone would rotate through eventually, and not for all that long.
A new job to match their interests, prior skills and temperament duh.
There are six million jobs listed in the US TODAY. The issue is the mismatch of the skills and location of the potential labor force with the requirements of the jobs.
But, as I was trying to say, in this economy there would always be some people rotating through, and there will always be open jobs. Economies the size and complexity of the US will never have full employment, nor will the number of available jobs match the number of workers. Do you disagree with this? If so, why?
In the future? I don’t have a crystal ball to tell you any more than anyone else ever has. But I suspect that with Moore’s law not changing anytime soon, both pushing that and taking advantage of it to create products and services would be a really really good place to look for job creation of all kinds in all kinds of industries. You can probably find futurists who would fill you in on projected trends in more detail if you really care.
Hey wanna know a secret? I am one of those 6 million, not really having a job at an employer per se since the dot com crash.
But I am a knowledge work par excellence, an innovator by trade, and despite being stuck in one of the poorest, least educated, highest unemployed areas of the country for family reasons, I use the skills I have to find a niche.
If others have been as unemployed as long as I, and I don’t doubt they have been, the question is, what have they done to make themselves innovative, if anything?
If the answer is literally nothing, then what can I say? Where I live is the heart of the area where people are bitching about when they say illegal immigrants are taking jobs, so really, all anyone has to do to get a job in the fields is show up and ask. But they don’t. No special skills required.
I don’t expect an economy as large and complex and specialized as the US to turn on a dime, do you?
But like I said, they can come here and work the harvests, not only are their jobs available, but many of them are all-you-can-eat if you like fruit.
In the bigger and longer term, as I posted above (have you read it), I think it is time to consider the difference between equity and cash if we really are going to have an economy that is so efficient, and whose standard of living is such that it is not worthwhile for low value jobs to be done here, resulting in a large permanently unemployed group. Also, in that case, we should have a serious discussion about the size of our population and (shudder) mandatory military service or other WPA like projects. I don’t have the answers on that but I am suggesting that the conversation would be worthwhile.
It is a fair question to ask if the US can really support 500 million people or not, which is where we are headed. It is not like China or India, each with 1 billion plus don’t have huge huge underclasses, far worse than we do. If we don’t want that, then we should consider what is the right size we can support with our economy. If later we need to grow, well, I think we know how to do that.
Not sure what you mean exactly, can you be more specific, and explain why it matters? As it is, I think the US is the second longest running country with an unchanged government in the world. The rest of the world has “gone under” at least once since, say, 1900, and most of the world’s people, even if they have stayed put, have seen their country “go under” in their life time, or their parent’s lifetime, yet each part of the world has managed to go on.
Yes, that includes India, China, and Indonesia, all with populations bigger than ours, so that is partly why I don’t get your Dark Ages thing. Same for the Soviet Union, which is probably up there too.
You throw 'em under the bus. I said I would retain them. In the meantime, send them here to work the harvest, the citrus harvest is getting underway and will last until March or so. Serious, let’s see some people come instead of complaining about no jobs and illegal immigrants. We can kill two birds with one stone. Since you seem to care about the chronically unemployed, especially the ones who are not knowledge workers, why not work to send some of them here where there most certainly is work for them?
Yeah, everything in the US is not available anywhere else on the world, yet the problem is it is all made elsewhere. Now you are not even making sense. Do you care about jobs, per capita income, worldwide distribution of availability of goods, or what?
Scroll up and search for my screen name, sheesh. I can’t read it FOR you.
Exactly, that is crative destruction. Amercians are best at driving the technology of Moores Law, and creating new products and services around that, which is all high value work that other Americans and others in the world can and do pay handsomely for.
At the same time, we are also very good, along with others now, of automating the previous generation of products and services, which are no longer such high value. They have become the horse-and-buggy of their day. They lasted a while while cars were perfected, e.g., but which would win out was clear. Who really cares if others get good at making horse and buggy when we are making the new car?
That may in fact be. That is why we need to have an honest discussion about alternatives, including why we have so many people in the first place, and if that is a good thing. Maybe we decide it is, then we have to have an honest discussion about distribution of wealth, of which there are many possibilities. So many we probably need another thread to solve that problem 
Not here. Locally, we literally have a heavily unemployed, undereducated core, mostly Tea Partiers with kids having babies in high school, who bitch about illegal immigrants taking all the jobs, which is somewhat true literally in our own back yard, yet they won’t lift a finger to take those jobs themselves.
Nor will any of the folks from other places come here to do those jobs, which are plentiful. Not enough for 6 million, but plentiful, and no one is moving to take them.
So don’t cry to me about people willing to do anything. It is simply not true.
Cars driven here are made here, even most foreign ones. But the work is increasingly automated, and what is left is knowledge work, even if it means operating a robot on an assembly line.
Manufacturing computers and other electronics is not likely to come here ever again in volume because of economy of scale issues. What might happen is that prototypes and early first version products could be built here until scale in the market is created, for some products. We did this for one dot-com computer company (very successful) I worked for. We paid a pretty penny extra to be close to the factory beause we were nowhere near ready to totally automate it, we needed to work closely on each manufacturing run to tweak things. Of course all the components we used probably were built elsewhere, because they were more automatable I suppose.
So I don’t get your point, exactly.
hell no. inthe bigger picture, I posted above what might be a modest suggestion. In the small picture, I have personally met enough Indian engineers online who had the motivation to use their computer and load it up with free software and LEARN A USEFUL SKILL to know it can be done. I do it myself, almost daily.
I know very few Americans who have or would try this, even over 10 years of unemployment, even though they have a computer perfectly capable of helping them do this. It is all available for free.
And now, pretty much all college coursework is available online for free too, even from the best universities. Sure, you don’t get the credit or diploma, but you do get the knowledge and skills. I know tons of Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Russians, who see this as a way to advance, but very few Americans. As a hiring manager, I would certainly consider this as ipressive “get up and go”, which Americans used to consider a strength, I don’t think degrees are strictly necessary for lots of knowledge work. I t is not like we check on degrees for Indian program shops, or any web design work, right? If you can demonstrate you can do the work, then there you go.
computers are not obolete, why do you seem to think so?
Another example form my career: Probably about 1996 I worked on a brief contract for a company that was working on technology that would allow one terabyte of data to be stored on a single disk. Maybe the state of the art at retail was 20 megabytes at the time? In any case, it was futuristic. Yet today, that is the state of the art at retail, and can be bought for well under 100 dollars. And there is plenty of software to go along with the need for that much space.
So somewhere people are working on similar futuristic things, some not as far out in the futire, some as far, and some further out. Look for those technologies, and get trained on those targets. They are gonna happen, and jsut as today’s apps were unimaginable 15 years ago, so is it hard to imagine what we will be using 15 years from now.
But every industry will be affected.
In the meantime, there is no reason wy people can’;t get educated for free on current technology, and find a way to find a niche to either use it or advance it for some pay if they don’t want to come here and pick oranges. None at all. They already have a computer sufficient to allow them to do it, and all the internet connection they need.
it is not being sent anywhere, it is freely available for people to use and create services around. Including Americans. Contracts that are being sent elsewhere involve older services, not the newest highest value stuff. Tariffs simply don’t make sense if that is what you are advocating, nor does chopping down our forests to make chopsticks for us if that is what you mean.
A lot of the programming is low value compared to other more modern work, yes.
I can’t say with as much certainty about biotech research, I am guessing if your mythical 6 million is trained for that, they should prepare for an international career, just as many in the world do regarding America. We are not the only place with scientists, universities, and finance you know. Maybe it is news to you, but the rest of the world is not populated by monkeys.
I used to manage international software products for a company that was, and still is, the world leader in certain areas of scientific analysis for biotech and pharma. I can assure you American products get a fair shake around the world, but it is necessary to innovate innovate innovate because things change really fast and the world is a competitive place. Just as few American electronic companies would not use international components even if manufacturing here, biotech companies around the world would not work without American products and services, it is not worth it to them to duplicate the functionality themselves.
Plus in many cases like this, the IP is largely owned by American companies anyway, which is largely why I raised the issue of equity vs. cash in the post above you seem unwilling to read.
Depends on the lab and the specific job of course.
What I think you don’t grasp is how quickly specific knowledge work becomes old hat and lesser value in the supply/demand economy. The highest value work remains either in America, or in American companies for the most part.
But there are smart people everywhere, are you suggesting American companies not be allowed to hire them simply because they are not in the US? Many people would be willing to come to the US, and companies would facilitate it, but lots of American object to that, even though those foreigners spent the last 10 years learning these skills while your 6 million sat on their 6 million asses.
And you get what you pay for. In the most cutting edge, highest value areas, the ability to manage effectively is the key value in a competitive place. Can people manage a shoe factory in Indonesia or Vietnam? Sure, but that is scut work. Can they do the work Nike does at HQ? No way, otherwise there would be such firms in the marketplace, and Nike and the other brand sneakers would not draw such a premium at retail.
More than that. You are deluding yourself. No manufacturing, but probably every other corporate function is based in the US.
I am not forgetting it. I have told you that a lot in this thread. But what America does is innovate faster.
I’d say most of the innovation in my semi-late model Toyota is a joint effort, and it was surely built in the US.
But you solution doesn’t even make sense. You would have Americans, who are limited in number, build every product and service in every industry solely for a domestic market. Even if we wanted to do that, we can’t do the work of 6 billion or so in the world with our 300 million. We are not that efficient
Anyway I am not worried that each place has its strengths and weaknesses. If Americans see an opportunity in cars, they will be fine. If not, so what? All foreign our cars are essentially joint efforts already anyway.
Yup, while Amerians bitch, Indians and others are using the same free materials to learn useful skills, so they get the work. Hey, I use the materials too, and so I manage, I don’t see why others can’t.
If those folks can’t or won’t value education, and can’t or won’t travel to where work is plentiful, then yeah, we need to have a serious discussion, as I said at the top of the thread. But I will personally take people to get jobs in the field if they show up in this area, I made that promise last year too in a similar thread, but no one came.
The ones in this thread where I suggested an out of the box solution and starting a broader discussion instead of the same old same old rant.
Well, to the extent they are willing to do what illegal immigrants do, you can take that number right off the top. Wind and solar installation jobs are in high demand, nursing jobs are plentiful pretty much everywhere, especially in rural areas, and so on.
Let’s get people in those jobs ASAP, then come back about the rest, OK?
Not from what I am hearing from my well placed sources who want me back. But in any case, these jobs have multiplier effects, they are creating the core technology that will be used in the future in products and services. Study what happens there and look out in the future for the jobs that will be created, they won’t be the same jobs of today.
Few Americans have the background for those jobs. Many can train themselves to use the tools of the previous few generations (dot com until today) to make themselves useful, millions already have. Many of the rest can come here and pick fruit literally tomorrow.
We have a big and complex economy. People will specialize where and in what they are interested in. But most I would say are not willing to either get a minimum amount of education and hustle, or move to where there is work. If that is true, then it is a problem that needs a solution, but disconnecting the US from the world economy as you suggest won’t work.
See above.Start with every job done by an illegal immigrant today. healthcre, energy, I would look there to start.
May be. That is why I want you to read my post at the top of the thread. As I just said, disconnecting the US from the world economy is not a solution.
Are you interested in the short term, the mid term, or the long term?
You think “building computers” requires lots of people in a factory? It is pretty damn automated, I am sure you can find lats of Taiwanese videos of mother board manufacturing online.
Or maybe you mean the sort of manufacturing of stuff like Ipods from Eastern China? Is that really what you are advocating we should desire and strive for in the US?
Uh, no. Just no.
I can see (post bailout) letting US car companies go for a while to see what shakes out, but unless the goal is to build more customized cars on the fly, I doubt that is going to be anything special in the long run. But by then the baby boomer demographic bump in the workforce will be done and we can reassess.
See post 29, cripes.
Yeah, way ahead of you bud! See post 29. I don’t know if I buy the premise, but I am wiling to consider it without your hysterics though.
Aside from sticking people with label pejorative labels, which is not helpful, we redistribute wealth all the time. So how and for what benefit we do that is always fair game, it is one of Congress’ primary functions. Doing just that has been all over the news lately, perhaps you noticed?
Not a specialist in consumer debt, but you may be aware of a certain transformative technology set that occurred in that time frame. I would place the consumer debt, particularly real estate, after that period.
And btw, I think fundamental research into the mathematics of derivatives is going to create lots of jobs in the future too. Didn’t know this until recently, but I learned from a book that a classmate of mine from undergrad was one of the primary drivers of innovation in what I think is a very nascent field. He has exactly the same educational background as I do, being from the same department at the same school - he is a year older - so I am comfortable suggesting there is a lot of opportunity there, even if it measn investing in alleviating concerns about how it works. Lots of our industry started like that and then regrouped, I am confident that will happen here and be a very valued option (no pun intended).
Or we could let Indians and Chinese do the math and create the products and services I suppose.
I discussed this in post 29. That you couldn’t find it is pretty disturbing actually. Anyway, to the extent that unemployed people want someone else to hand them a job, instead of displaying the vim and vigor of American get up and go, maybe they are already lost causes.
No, success at innovation has nothing to do with school rank and everything to do with get up and go.
It is irrelevant.
But what might be relevant: If a company wants top performers, and can choose between a middling American or a top Indian or Irish guy, why should they take the American, even at the same cost?
But if that American was really the same as the Indian, it might be worth it for some reasons at same or even more cost to take the local guy.
10 -20 years ago, there were just as many if not more unemployed or underempleyd Indian and Chinese engineers, for example, but they have done what Amercans are generally still best at, but which our unemployed may have forgotten how to do well: Organize into efficient work units.
Bring American innovative knowhow with Indian organizing skills, and oursourcing will slow down fast. Just saying.
Well, zillions is a hyperbolic word to be sure. But look at job boards like linked in and job site aggregation sites. There are jobs out there, and there are workers out there. Why they are not getting matched is a very interesting question without a simple answer.
I reject that all the jobs I mentioned are low paying, and I certainly reject that they are all dead end. I myself started in a fast food place like a zillion others during high school.
It is well known that during the CA Gold Rush all the wealth ended up in the hands of those who provided goods and services to the miners, not the miners themselves.
If anyone ends up in a dead end job forever, that is their fault for not taking the opportunity to train for something better, and remaining flexibnle for a lifetime (constant retraining). OTOH, there is certainly no shame to running a series of restaurants, no matter how humble, to make a living where other people need to eat.
And it is a a disturbing turn of the phrase when you say there is no prospect for anyone ever to have a high value job. Stop it. 10s of, if not 100 million people are already engaged in such jobs, and they went to the same schools as children as everyone else.
Like I said, if people are really lost, then we carry them. That is fine, we have done that for decades, but to say that children don’t have the chance at the education needed to do a non-minimum wage job in the US is stretching it indeed. People can and will succeed from everywhere, we need to educate and motivate, and the rest will take care of itself, that is precisely the strategy of countries you are worried about have followed for a while now, and it used to be our prime strategy too.
Plus, I sure don’t get why you mean to bitch about low paying jobs when you want to bring sneaker and computer factories back here, when those are far worse working conditions,and far more dead end jobs, and far lower paying jobs then coffee shops, e.g.
Sure, but for people with training and experience to identify the assumptions in such a system, and question them (ahem! see post 29), innovative possibilities present themselves for consideration.
What I said was an allusion to the post you can’t seem to find. Hint 29 29 29. Maybe you are not the innovative type if you can;t think of other options, that is fine, you seem smart enough to consider them carefully when you see them, and maybe even to be enlightened enough to brainstorm other options when you see one or two outside the box.
me, I am not so alarmed in the long run. Even if we are to have an underemployed “class” in the US, still people will rise out of it. And it would surely be in Congress’s best interests to make sure that conditions are ripe so that those in the high value end generate enough value to carry the rest. How that carrying happens is fair game, and Congress has the authority to implement pretty much any practical solution as needed.
All the pieces are possible, what’s needed is a consensus. And consensus needs an honest discussion. As I posited it may be time for in post 29.