You can’t possibly be serious. Computers are everywhere. They’re selling like hotcakes.
If computers are obsolete what in God’s name do you think is replacing them?
So? That doesn’t make computers obsolete. It means they’re getting more efficient. That’s way different from obsolete.
Horse and buggy carts are obsolete. Switching operators are obsolete. The day you can say something is coming along to replace computers is the day you can say computers are obsolete.
If you and I were face to face I would bet you $100,000 in hard US cash on the spot that in 15 years from now we will still be using computers.
Not everyone can program a computer. But even if they could, there’s still not enough jobs for them. Not even close. Nor will there ever be.
You’ve got to be kidding me. You just said that “They already have a computer sufficient to allow them to do it, and all the internet connection they need”. That’s true of everyone in the world.
You really believe this, don’t you?
We’re moving research and development overseas. I gave you an example - biotech. Read, and be enlightened.
But they sure a hell don’t want Americans coming there to work.
If you manage to navigate a foreign country’s hellish immigration policy and get a job there you betcha you won’t enjoy the freedoms you do here.
Basically, if your solution to America’s growing ranks of high-skilled unemployed is “leave the country”
All you’re doing is moving the problem around;
That’s a piss poor solution for the future of America.
Define ‘American products’.
Why not? Their workers can achieve the same quality for less.
Intellectual property can be and is very often stolen and duplicated. Or even made obsolete. Everything from counterfeit drugs in India to knockoffs in China. In fact, China is making it a rule that if you want to open a factory there you make CHINA your partner - as in, they get your intellectual property.
Man, you really don’t know about this stuff, do you?
Wrong. A lot of American companies are opening R&D labs elsewhere. I gave you a link to examples of that already.
“while your 6 million sat on their 6 million asses” … and where do you get anything to support this hateful assertion?
BTW do you even realize that capital is mobile and labor isn’t? Do you understand the consequences of this?
What you don’t understand is other nations can produce top notch innovators just like we can. What that means for America is it doesn’t matter if you are top notch talent - very soon you will be out of a job because someone else can do bleeding edge R&D for less. And in several industries they are already doing just that.
The American economy that you envision is painting itself into a corner.
That is clearly and obviously false.
Not fast enough. Like I said and even documented for you, cutting edge R&D is migrating away.
Most? Would you care to back that up?
It doesn’t take 6 billion to serve the US market. If it did we would have no unemployment here or anywhere else. :rolleyes:
But you’re saying they’re not innovators like we are. The job market clearly treats them more fairly than us, since to get a job here you have to be the very top of your class, while in India you don’t. Which is why their middle class is no doubt growing and ours is imploding into a black hole.
Probably because no one believes you can do that. We can all see the employment statistics and see that what you say is simply not true.
Oh, I see. #29. Those weren’t solutions. Germany and Switzerland protect their industries, unlike us.
But yet we still have 5 people fighting for every available job opening.
You are committing the fallacy of pointing to an oasis and saying there is no desert. That is not an ocean; it is merely an oasis.
Nothing wrong with getting people qualified for the existing jobs. But “the rest” is such a tragically huge number that your solution would be a dismal failure for all the people that get left behind.
And unless our standard of living declines most of them won’t be here either.
Ah yes, bifurcation. The few who can get the high skills and navigate the Byzantine treacherous candidate screening process will get the good jobs and the rest work on the farms at minimum or below minimum wage in the most unregulated and second most unsafe industry in the world.
(Hint: until the Government can get around to fighting death by heat stroke or death by being shredded by machinery, picking fruit is only a wise choice if you’re trying to cut down on the population…)
Care to substantiate this?
Who said anything about disconnecting?
I want us to protect our job-making sectors just like India and China do. Why can they do it but we are somehow forbidden to?
In the long term, at the rate we’re going, we’re going to become a plutocracy.
That’s not an argument in favor of computers being obsolete.
sigh That is absurd on its face. If it was that well automated then there would be no point in having the factory in Taiwan.
Would you rather have those 6 million building iPods and be contributing citizens or would you have them drawing welfare benefits and sucking off your tax dollars for years on end while they try to learn how to become master innovative coders or researchers, etc.?
Hell, at least those Foxconn workers could get a raise. How often do you hear of Americans striking for and getting a raise?
LOL!! They’ve been talking about the boomers retiring for ages. It ain’t happened. The social security retirement age is going up and keeping them in the workforce. Furthermore they’re staying in the workforce because their 401k went kaboom in the subprime crash. Moreover a lot of Boomers are working because they never could afford a 401k and are barely making ends meet.
In fact, a bunch of Boomers will soon be leaning on their decimated 401k’s. The stock market is woefully ill-prepared for this coming mess.
Oh, that was your solution? Really? To protect our manufacturing industries? This is what Germany does, after all.
So instead we’re supposed to buy your social darwinistic nonsense?
Wait… you just said 6 million Americans can’ t get off their asses. You’ve been sticking people with pejorative labels all along!
(continued part 2, since SDMB says I hit the character limit…)
LOL! Wealth has been getting redistributed up toward the rich, but certainly not toward the working class. What is this redistribution that you believe happens?
That’s why I said “1995-2001 would have not have looked anything NEARLY as cheerful as it did”. The rise of the internet would not have gone so well without consumers having money to spend.
If there had been no credit card industry changes like we had in 1970, computers would not have been so ubiquitous by 1995. People would not have been able to afford them. If their ability to refinance their homes back then was what it is now in 2010, even more people would have been unable to afford computers, as computers were damned expensive back then compared to now. $400 for 16 mb of RAM in 1992. Not gigabytes… megabytes. I know, I ran a computer store with a friend back then, we speculated on RAM right before a major fire in Taiwan that drove prices through the stratosphere. We made big bucks off that.
Define “lots”.
It turns out I did see it, but your solution was so off the mark that I found myself not believing you were pitching this.
I don’t think you understand how Germany handles their business. We’d call it protectionism here.
Mind you, I’m all about protectionism… but you just spent all day ranting about how evil it is.
When you physically have more people than you have jobs, what do you have left for people to get up and go to?
Do you realize how much it costs to emigrate to another country? You have to have a job already in order to emigrate. It costs a $30,000 fee to move to Canada if you don’t have relatives living there. You can’t go to Canada if you have health problems. What are people supposed to do, rob a bank in order to pay these fees?
It has everything to do with there being an available job. If there’s no available job all the innovation in the universe won’t get you hired to do jack monkey squat.
So you’re proving my point - 90% of those who compete for a job, by nature, must be denied - because only 10% of them can be the top 10%.
So the other 90% should just live off welfare?
That’s madness, if you assume globalism. Why not take the foreign guy for less?
Wrong. They have organized into lower paying work. It doesn’t get any more complex than that.
According to the rules of globalism if you run a company by these rules and I compete against you with cheap labor I’m gonna own your breakfast, lunch and dinner.
I can answer that one simply: there are more workers than there are jobs.
The math cannot be denied.
Name me one biotech research company that’s going to hire a guy with only fast food work on his resume.
College tuition for a university that will actually get an employer’s attention is easily $10,000 a semester.
Unless you are homeless and getting food from a soup kitchen you will never make that much money working fast food. Where many people now get money for college is from loans.
And that bubble is about to burst. I’d duck and cover if you have a kid going into college. Even more people are going to be priced out of higher education than ever, when that happens.
Okay, I’ll stop it. Especially since I never said anything like “there is no prospect for anyone ever to have a high value job” in the first place!
What I said was there are not enough of these jobs to take everyone who tries to get qualified.
What part of ‘there are more people looking for work than there is work’ are you not understanding?
They’re lost because we keep setting more and more people adrift.
I didn’t say all children. I did say that a significant portion of the unemployed population will be locked out.
They’re also using protectionism. You’re forgetting that.
They weren’t low paying and they didn’t have such bad working conditions when they were here.
Part of the whole point of offshoring is to escape to countries where you can pay lower than minimum wage, pollute the environment with impunity and build factories that aren’t to code. You can’t get away with that in America, except with farming.
Oh, I found it.It’s just that your “solutions” are so lacking in connection to reality that it’s hard to believe you’re actually pitching that as a solution. But I’ve explained your error already - your solution is to follow Germany’s example, and Germany is a protectionist country.
Granted, I like protectionism… but where you’re coming from, you’ve damaged your own case.
Mid-level jobs are disappearing.
The middle class is shrinking.
The ranks of the poor are exploding.
History is not having your back here.
We’re de-evolving toward a plutocracy.
The problem is they don’t want to carry the rest. That’s why the Tea Party exists - they don’t care how many people starve as long as they keep their money.
“No free ride”, and all that claptrap.
Let’s review this half of your solution, shall we?
You already admitted we can’t be arsed to expand welfare to support people and keep them from being homeless while they languish without a job while learning how to be world class innovators.
What you don’t realize is that the welfare we can’t be arsed to deal with includes money for education; we’re cutting that as we speak. We can’t be arsed to extend unemployment benefits - the Republicans see the unemployed as lazy, and you see them as “people who won’t get off their ass”.
Ignorant selfish Americans have closed off every avenue for jobless Americans to improve their lot. At the way things are going most of them will be out on the street with no access to a computer to become these master coder Gods you think everyone can/should become.
That’s the problem with this situation: when you wake up and find that you’re in outer space without a helmet you ain’t innovating your way out of that. And America is swirling down the toilet drain toward this end.
Go look up ‘plutocracy’ and compare it to this country and to where we’re headed.
I think it was you that said compuiters are obsolete, not me. If not, then lets drop it.
I will say that any indivistual computer is pretty much obsolete by the time it hits the shelf, as newer better ones are sure to be available by then at the same price.
It is that constant improvement that is a great example of Creative Destruction.
So no, computers as a class are not obsolete - although the uses of which a pc class machine are best suited for are dropping with new types of devices finding rapid adoption - but any individual computer is subject to rapid obsolescence in the market place, some fresh food might hold its value longer.
That day is here for many current computers. See ereaders, smart phones, game devices, mp3 players, all very popular and all doing functions once reserved for PCs. There are probably other examples too.
Older computers are so obsolete you can barely give them away, in many cases you can not. Seriously, a 15 year old PC, even in perfect working order, I bet you could not even get a school to take it off your hands and put it to good use.
I don’t know how you got on this jag, I’d take that bet if you were to say that the computers you are talking about are the computers of today, and I might take the bet if you were to say that the computers would even have the form factor and functionality of today and would be as widespread performing general functions. I am far from convinced off the top of my head that that will be the case, just look from 15 years ago to today to see the change in the marketplace.
If someone can really program a computer, they have a useful skill to contribute to the economy. In fact, if they can write, edit, translate, test, manage software projects, and many other skills, or want to learn, they can join for free any given day a professionally organized open source software project and improve their skills, create visibility and a portfolio of their work, while networking with others, and quite possibly get paid for doing it.
Almost all of America has at least some skill they can contribute, for as much time ore as little as they desire, to such a project. If they have access to the internet, that is all they need.
The barriers are low, there is no excuse, it is one large factor for how India and China and Russia and others are building their skill levels. If Americans simply won’t learn how to do the jobs of tomorrow, and others will, then why are you crying that they don’t get the jobs?
You really believe this, don’t you?
We’re moving research and development overseas. I gave you an example - biotech. Read, and be enlightened.
it says whaty I have been saying:
1 - the ip stays with the hiring company
2 - the ability to manage locally is the driving factor
3 - the outsourcing does not lead to local job loss
What is your concern exactly? There is nothing new here, I wrote pretty much the same thing about 1996 when I was devising business models for a software translation company. The word outsourcing was not coined yet, or at least not in common use, but we were already doing that with our translators by then, and India was on the radar. I am not concerned, nothing has played out differently than predicted 15 years ago.
Except I will confess I did not realize how many Americans would gripe rather than work towards making themselves perennially useful compared to the emerging economies of the world. I am still surprised at that I suppose.
Really? I know Americans working in high tech and other fields in almost every country, including the ones you are probably most concerned about. If you want to work someplace, and are willing to work hard to understand the work culture there, you can do it. People around the world do just that to come here and we are pretty foreign to them.
Not everyone wants to work overseas, but those who do tend to find it rewarding. It is not for everyone, but it is available to people if they want to pursue that path.
I never said that. You are going to make a poor spokesperson, remind me not to hire you.
I am not offering a solution at all, I am suggesting that a conversation building consensus about out of the box thinking is called for. Personally, I think teh jobs situation will take care of itself in time. I am only offering, at ridiculous length, rebuttals to your notion that there is no possible present of future for America’s unemployed.
If someone were to actually suggest that, I would agree with you.
OTOH, let’s note that the basis of your complaint is that jobs have been moved, and that I assert that American labor has historically been pretty mobile, so it is not so far fetched to expect it might remain at least a little mobile
The same way as you - products created by American companies.
Now you are just making shit up for the sake of making it up.
Briefly, there is always a build vs buy decision. The value added buy buying now may be greater than building because of the increased risk, cost, and diversions of core resources to what is not your core competency.
America’s great competitive advantage is in creating, over and over, the leading edge tools,products, and services in a lot of industries. It is what we do, we innovate efficiency basically. We do new stuff that hasn’t been done before better and faster. Other folks do other stuff better than us, that is life. It doesn’t make sense for us to make memory chips, e.g. because South Korea does that. But in the end, when you or I buy memory chips, note it is just a small component of something more complex, and we don’t really care about what memory chip it is. Who captures more value, the device maker or the memory chip maker? the device maker.
but who captures more value, the chip designer or the chip maker? Hmmm maybe the chip designer, and that might very well be a American company, and so might the company that makes the software used to design the chip, and the machine that manufactures the chip. So appearances can be deceiving
It better be made obsolete, that is the point of the Creative Destruction this thread is about.
So what, that has nothing to do with jobs here.
Not necessarily so, and even then there are ways to manage that. One is you do the really core stuff elsewhere, another is you distribute stuff around. That is how Thailand found that when the Japanese left, they really had nothing ecept lots of infrastructure but no knowhow in the economy. Americans are smart and innovative, remember? Nothing particularly valuable will be put at risk or lost, and it won’t affect jobs. We especially are not going to duplicate the factories of Eastern China in the US under any circumstances, so the point is moot. We might build a factory here or there where it is easier to control the intellectual property, but really, three will be some serious shit jobs in those factories wherever they are. No Americans will want them.
Why don’t you share a bit about your background. But yes, it has been a large part of my career to know about this stuff and devise solutions in the real world taking it into account. Tell us about your interest in it?
Sure, because there are smart people everywhere, but not enough in the US, and we can’t import those folks to the US in sufficient numbers due to VISA limits. During dot com, I was recruiting mid level managers and engineers from around the world, with particular skills, because they just didn’t exist in sufficient numbers in the US, and for those who did, there was to much demand for me to hire as many as I needed. Now it would be harder to do that, especially on the scale that a google or microsoft needs. So they simply hire there, just like Japanese car companies hire here.
it is what you said, the numbers came from you, the amount of time they haven’;t worked came from you. If t is hateful, and I don;t agree it is, it is from you. You are the one arguing that people can’t work anymore, I am pointing out there is stuff coming, three is stuff available, and there is quality free training available for all.
Since you seem ot feel none of that is of any value whatsoever to any of 6 million people, then I can only conclude they are lazy indeed.
I don’t really think so, but from your descriptions alone I would have to conclude that.
Yes, and that is only true in the general sense. Labor is mobile, not just as quickly. Mexicans travel to the US to find work, don’t they? People moved to the Bay Area by the millions during dot com to find work, and most left afterwards to go back. Those are just a few examples.
If people want a job, they can come here and pick oranges. There are no corporate capital barriers that keep them from doing it, heck, almost everyone here has ancestors who did just that, or they have done it themselves. See “Dust Bowl Migration” for example.
Stop making excuses for 6 million people. Something like 85% of the US table orange market is on the trees waiting to be picked right now. Most of it will be picked by illegals who could be easily displaced by anyone who shows up ready to work. And that is just oranges, there are crops in this region year round.
They can, but they generally haven’t yet, and there are structural reasons for that I dont care to go into here. But our competitive advantage won’t last forever if we have to carry deadweight, so we either have to get the deadweight moving, or find a better way to carry them. I don’t see what is so complicated about that, do you?
But what you don’t understand is the value is not in R&D itself, it is in both the IP embodied in the R & D, and the ability to translate the R & D itno products and services repeatedly (through Creative Destruction, remember) that people will pay for.
Like I said, for now, there are structural reasons we are best at that, but others are smart and they will do well, so we need to innovate to compete where maybe we didn’t need to compete as much before. I am not all that worried about it, btu you seem to fear the competition. Refusing to acknowledge or interact with the 6.6 billion people in the world or so that are not Americans will not solve anything, it will only make it worse by far and fast.
And in several industries they are already doing just that.
Hardly dude. perhaps instead of a cute turn of the phrase, you can be very specific about what you mean by that and what rebuttals you have considered before coming to your conclusion?
yeah, Nikes are sold and marketed completely outside the US. The Nike outlet store I go to, the commercials and ads I see, they are all outside the US. And they are all for a non-US company
Look, we are talking about a US based international company, jsuyt like Toyota is an Japan based international company. Three are jobs everywhere, but the real driving force remains in the home country, as does the lions share of any IP generated overseas. Get over it, we are not kciking out foreigners, and we are not leaving the rest of the world’s economy. It is jsut not going to happen, so you need a new angle.
Yes, and the IP stays with the US company. Just like NTT and other Japanese companies have US based R & D for the benefit of the larger Japanese conglomerate. Big deal. It means nothing bad in the scheme of things.
Sure, since it was assembled in the US, and Toyota is pretty well known for autonomy given to workers in the factory, it is safe to assume a lot of the innovation in manufacturing was local.
Second, a lot of the components are locally sourced. Surely the marketing and sales and distribution channels, and probably almost all of the financing operations, are US designed and delivered. I am comfortable with that because I built a lot of such operations for software companies in Japan, and because of the cultural, and sometimes regulatory climate, we deferred a lot to our local in country employees while keeping ultimate decision making power. I would be astounded it Toyota’s American operations are not run the same way in reverse.
Were I you , I would not be so quick to :rolleyes: while demonstrating such a profound misunderstanding of basic international economics.
I am not an expert in the sociology of India, but my understanding is they have far wider gulfs in income and other basic amenities that we can ever dreamof in our worst case, and because of the caste system and other internal prejudices, there are extremely large swaths of the population who will never be brought into the modern economy. Even at full speed, they will be carrying a lot too, more than our whole country’s worth of people. But because of their size, the number of people they are pulling up and graduating is huge too.
India is learning how to innovate, they are smart, but they don’t have the structural advantages we have that I alluded to. That is why you don’t know the Indian brand for pretty much anything. They will catch on soon enough, but there is still time. If we stand still, or withdraw as you advocate, then we will surely get passed.
What employment statistics are you talking about precisely? Without giving my location away precisely, I am in the orange belt of California’s Central Valley. This is where Mexicans and other illegals come to work, Right now is the start of the peak of the orange picking season. ~85% of the table oranges in the US come from within, say, 50 miles of here. Do the math. Orange trees are planted every 21 feet I think, and they go on for square mile after square mile. Each tree might have 200 fruits on it (guessing). Every one of those fruits will be picked by hand. It takes a lot of people, and most of them will be Mexicans, and many of those will be illegal. That last group ios easily replaced if only people would show up.
Repeat this for every crop in the valley, which is roughly 75 miles wide and 400miles long.
Seriously, if people are willing, there is work.
I am not saying they will get wealthy, but they will get working. All they need to do is show up.
Oh I give all this attention to you, and you are dismissive with a sentence that has nothing to do with the point?
Not true, because so many jobs go unfilled. Maybe 5 people for the menial jobs, but come on, after 10 years, they can still only do what they could do 10 years ago? How’d that happen? Other countries got educated and healthy (or more so) in that time,simply because they wanted to.
No, the fallacy is yours. You are making one excuse after anotheras to why people can’t or won’t work. And your solution seems to be to play hide and seek, but mostly hide, from the rest of the world. It is beyond bizarre at this point.
I have offered plenty a plan. Every illegal immigrant could be displaced tomorrow by the 6 million, or maybe 6 million is not enough. Even if people hae been spinning heir wheels, they can still start to learn new tasks, you know, the ones that require hustle and vim and vigor, you know, what made America great, if their old job is not there anymore. If they won’t move for an existing job that they are qualified for, and they won’t train for a new one, and the old one is not needed anymore, then what is really left to do?
They will be here, for a while, and then they will get obsoleted by a new wave of high value jobs. Rinse and repeat, that is how it works.
My father published a series of career magazines for high school and college students in the 70s. There were already articles in every issue saying how many times in their lives the readers would need to change jobs and even careers. This is nothing new. That was almost 40 years ago.
Fuck that, there is no screening process. Make your own damn job. The software you need is available for free, legally, so is the source code. Anythign you want to do, if you think someone will pay you for it, talk them into it.
That is precisely what is happening in India and China and pretty much everywhere EXCEPT the US (in volume, I am doing it and I am not alone), so your excuses ring very hollow and uninformed.
And you are really uninformed and making excuses about picking fruit. It is honest labor, it could lead to other work (it has traditionally), and it is not killing people in any numbers out of proportion to other industries. Despite the hot summer weather here, I am sure more truck drivers die on the job in the US than field workers in this Valley.
And heat stroke picking oranges won’t happen, it is a winter crop, and winters are pretty mild here
Uh,m your list of excuses? How labor is not mobile enough to go where there are jobs? How people are not qualified for the new jobs despite being out of work for 10 years? How entire armies of computer programmers have sprung up out of nowhere in India, China, and elsewhere in the same time, but not in the US, despite your bitching about those jobs being so desirable and valuable? Etc.
Be more specific, much more. That sounds like disconnecting to me if I read between the lines, but I will be open enough to hear sufficient details of what you mean. I am certain it won’t be practical, but give it a go. Maybe I will be wrong about that.
Could be, but trying to bring back the equivalent of our era;s horse and buggy jobs, or to derail innovation, is not going to do the trick.
No, just as the US has competitive strengths, so does Taiwan, and they know how to design and build motherboards like no one else. Not only do they have the human knowhow, but they have the infrastructure in place too. There is a lot of work that goes into it, but the jobs are not men and women soldering chips on a board - that is the part that is automated. It is nothing like a car factory for example, where there is a person at every station doing a specific task over and over.
That’s a false dichotomy, but no, I prefer that we not spend the massive investment to build factories and rejigger them with every apple release (or phone upgrade or whatever) just to give a relative handful of people some of the worst jobs on earth. Whatever money that would cost, I am sure you can think of a better way to spend it than that.
BTW, not only the worst jobs on earth, but at a cost that will make the end products less competitive, maybe non-competitive in the market place, so you will end up tossing the baby with the bathwater anyway. You will end up with shiny factories with nothing American to build, competing for contracts with China to build the latest Nokia phone or whatever. Good work!
Get organizing if that is what you think is needed, I don’t object. Me, I try not to get paid by the piecework, or by the hour so that issue won’t come up.
WTF? did you even read it? I don;t care if we do no maufacturing here at all personally, and I don’t see the need to protect anything whatsoever, that is all YOUR position.
What I said was noting like that,or even the oppposite of it, what I said was that it might be time to open an out of the box discussion, and I tossed out something to get the ball rolling. I don’t purport to have a solution, only a suggestion that we put more on the table than you seem willing to grasp.
You really aren’t good at reading comprehension are you? I suggested we find new ways to relate the cash we live on day to day with the growing equity value in the market as a way to bridge possibly chronic joblessness and general lack of liquid cash among the broader population.
How do you get “social darwinism” out of that pray tell?
yeah, that was shorthand summary of your endless litany of excuses as to why they won’t go to where the jobs are, or retrain, or make their own jobs, or…
[/QUOTE]
I’m gonna read it,but I probably won’t reply given the shallowness of the discussion you gave in this post. I am open to you redeeming yourself, but not expecting it.
Well, direct and indirect numbers are (or were recetnly) pretty large already, I would say very roughly many multiples of that if any anlaytic or empirical or theoretic break throughs can be made.
In fact, I would say that the mathematics of finance, for better or worse, is going to be a growth industry for a very long time. It seems to me form prelinary research I have done that level of mathematical understanding of derivatives today is anlaous to the understanding of the math of physics right before Newton got hit on the head by an apple. The current market shock might be the equivalent of the apple falling. Derivatives aren’t going away anymore than gravity did for Newton, but there was immense value unlocked by his insights into the situation and his creation of the calculus. He could never have imagined!
I take that as a complement that you didn’t get it. That is usually how my best ideas have started when first presented to folks so wedded to the status quo. Thanks!
So at least I was understanding you correctly, and yes, I think it is not only not worthless, it is destructive.
For some it is like being retired, or on a very long vacation. For others, they will be itching to be innovative and entrepreneurial. I envision in general, people will retool for their next job during their time off, then back into the work force while others rotate out.
You may have noticed that no country ever, esp. the US has had full employment of the entire workforce, let alone the entire population. What people will do when not working is hardly a big deal, millions of people do that every day and always have.
Excuses excuses. If people want to do it, they will find a way. People have the same barriers to coming to the US, but they manage to get here. Oh there must be some who never make it, but there are plenty who do.
And there are almost 200 countries in the world, not all of them have those sorts of barriers to Americans or maybe others too.
Not always true, but if you are entrepreneurial enough, and interested in a market enough, you will find a way. One could be an English teacher almost anywhere for example.
I know you want to make that point, but it is not true. Teh number that gets hired is not a fixed percentage like that, it is a percentage of the people who show interest. Generally, the highest skilled (by some measure for that job) will get the job. If people show interest, but don’t have the right skill level, why would they get hired?
And more importantly, what kind of jobs have 9x or more people with sufficient skills than jobs? I would think these would be pretty low skilled jobs to begin with. Indeed the sort of low value jobs that might be at risk of being done elsewhere at low cost.
I guess it would be terrifying to be a person that has only those kinds of jobs as options, but I don’t really think there are as many such people, for the forever future, as you seem to think. Oh sure, maybe now, but it need not stay that way.
They should seek a job more suited to some special skill they have, a job that is in lower demand (like fruit picking or they should improve their skill levels.
All of that is absent a better way to carry those who will inevitably fall through the cracks. I would defintiely not leave them on the streets, that is me, but I understand others might object to that level of compassion.
Because cost of labor is hardly the only factor to consider. In some cases it dominates the decision, in others it merely is a participant. What the other factors are are too situational to go into here.
That is silly. They are organized in an increasingly sophisticated manner to deliver products and services both domestically and foreign. They are not being paid less than they were 20 years ago. In fact, as wages have tended up, the cost advantage has slipped, and some work has come back, or moved elsewhere. Call centers are a good example of both cases, but not the only one.
In fact, maybe the best chance to bring routine programming jobs back is if the rest of the engineers in the world cost, say, 75% of what ours cost. Then the cost saving will not be worth the distance as frequently. It might hurt our pride that Indians and Chines and Brazilian engineers share the same standard of living as we do, but so what really?
You live by silly rules from a fortune cookie and I will operate in the real world and find a niche that likes what I bring. I don’t need every potential customer in the world, no company does. There is room for lots of types of companies. Americans have been best at finding those new niches in the past, it sucks that you are so dismissive of our historic strengths.
Maybe, but there are more unfilled jobs and unemployed workers TODAY then thre needs to be, because of lack of labor mobility and insufficient retraining during down time. That can’t be denied either.
And full employment, like no jobs available, is never going to happen.
So work on getting people into jobs that are there today with the energy you seem willing to invest in making excuses would be my suggestion.
Then see if new jobs arise, or new opportunities for people to make jobs arise when that happens. Like maybe a new lunch place can be supported when a company has hired the workers it needs, and well, heck, there is an unemployed guy who has always run a lunch place, imagine that!
Are you being intentionally dense, or is this line in error,or is it a joke, or what?
Probably more than that. That is why we need a discussion, as I said, but you missed, about ways to redistribute wealth by agreeing on what our broader goals are. This is a very good example of something that needs to be considered. Maybe our social contract should be that if unemployment is going to be relatively high, while equity markets are booming, then some of that equity can be re-invested in top notch education for people from k->college and maybe even grad school.
That is really a very top line suggestion, without any suggestion of mechanics as to how it would happen, but maybe something like that would create a feedback loop in the economy that would get people cycling as I said instead of being chronically unemployed, while keeping companies ultra competitive.
Yeah, that is a big problem, I totally agree, and I feel it. My gf is a PhD with a ton of loans, and nieces and nephews in the family are in college and moving quickly through high school. I agree it is a big big problem.
Totally agree.
But protectionism is no solution to that.
But that is life. I want to play basketball for a living, but I am a short middle agreed dude whose best athletic days are behind him and they never included basketball anyway. Too bad for me, I can play a pickup game at the park if I want, but the economy does not owe me a living at it.
Similarly for any other job.
I think moving forward a social contract where we provide a great education and the sprit of flexibility as a society, and individuals learn to value that, will do us well. Like anything in a big country, it will take time to turn that ship, but I think it will be worth the effort.
The part where each of those people who has sufficient skills for one of those jobs has made every effort to take it. I just have to walk around the corner to see the illegal Mexicans on the ladders in the orange trees to know that lots of people have decided they are indeed not desperate enough yet to do that.
I understand that feeling, I am a fish out of water here myself, but I also understand that many are, indeed, choosing the hand they are playing by not taking jobs for which they are suited, and for which they would be hired, if only they would show up and ask.
Which part of that don’t YOU understand?
Perhaps, and that is why we need an open conversation as a country as to how to match up the equity wealth we have but is not really liquid with the every day cash needs of what we consider basic human dignity.
I think, at first glance, that we can do that under our existing political system, but not without serious discussions as a nation.
I am not forgetting anything. You keep asserting it, but not offering any evidence it is a significant factor. You mentioned Sweden (or was it Switzerland, I forget) and Germany in passing as though they are the ones we are outsourcing to. It doesn’t make sense as you have written it, it is too incomplete a claim here.
You are joking right? Garment manufcturing has been one of the banes of American manufacturing history, where do you think the term “sweatshop” came from?
And we never had a significant computer manufacturing industry here, not in numbers, because there weren’t that many computers in the world back then >)
Plus, it is highly automated now, and not worth investing in. It is a formula for throwing money away. Better to give people the cash if you have it and don’t care what happens to it than try to run that business with it.
The solutions to present problems won’t be found in any real or imagined glory days of the past I am afraid to tell you, but the good news is, that is how all of American history has been! Never look back and repeat a prior economic phase! Why start now?
Really? I have outsourced before it was a word, and we never did it for any of those reasons. Translation is hardly polluting, it requires an internet connection, and back then far enough, a fax line, that is all. We had college educated workers, and we paid them more than fairly, in part because the work was sporadic for each of them, although at hq we were constantly busy. We were probably able to work on a moments notice in at least 50 countries and at least as many languages. Most of that work was not available in the US at any price, btw.
OK then, you give us your detailed protectionist solution. I only want to engender a conversation, so give us your absolute best proposal and we will discuss it. Among other thing, be sure to make your best case as to why it is a solution to these three things, since you brought them up.
Nothing comes easy. But times change. Every few years, they change. heck, Republicans have been planning for this day since the 1960s with Reagan, surely since his first term as President. It is not really clear they ever had a plan beyond this point, I think they are starting to improvise, and arguably self destruct, (another thread please!). In any case, the field is nearly ripe to ask 30 year questions again. Tea Party folks (and og knows I get to talk with enough here) are not really thinking past today and tomorrow, if at all. They will shape up if the long term conversation develops.
Not for the long term, but for the shorter term during a transition period I can see it.
I get that. But I also get that whatever arguments are being made for it, while persuasive to you and I, are not getting the job done, nor will that change if the argument stays the same. So a new approach is needed, and probably a pretty radical one.
Most Americans will be on the street? You mean 200 million of our near 400 million population is going to be on the street? Really? Literally? Citation please if the answer is yes.
Hyperbole is fun and all, and so is poetry, but I am not interested in rallying calls, I am interested in actual plans.
OK I guess I answered part 2.
But that is all the back and forth.
Please detail your protectionist plan, particularly show us how those 3 factors above are going to be solved in the short, mid, and long term, and if you can, anticipate the best counter arguments and counter them, or at least build the the counter -counters into the plan itself to increase its utility.
Aside from the fact that a recession has nothing to do with creative destruction, you still managed to answer your own question (thus proving a blind squirrel will eventually find an acron). Workers are now more productive, what used to take 10 people now takes 7. That “frees up” 3 people to go be more productive at something else.
It also means that the cost of production goes down as fewer workers are needed, which actually makes the US more competitive with other countries. The 7 US workers might demand $10/hour, 10 times more than their Central American counterpart, but if the US workers are more productive, they might be performing the same task that takes 20 Hondurans.
Not to mention that all those knowledge workers - developers, management consultants, systems integration experts, implementers, data analysts and so on - provide a real service. They allow companies to increase their knowledge. IOW, companies now have access to all this information that allows them to better identify opportunities to save money and reduce costs. It’s “disruptive technology”. It fundamentally changes and restructures the way companies do business. If you are unable or unwilling to change along with it, well, you end up like our OP writing page after page of what I assume will ultimately become his manifesto.
Offshoring is not new. In the beginning textile manufacturers left for cheap labor , no regulation and no environmental costs. We were assured that it was because the workers were uneducated and they were doing the kind of jobs Americans did not want anyway. It was a win for America. There are lots of small ghost towns that are good arguments with that. Cut the workers loose and let them find a way.
But offshoring continued with appliances, TVs, computers and other more sophisticated products. None are made here anymore. How is that good? But the workers, cut them loose and let them find their way.
Manufacturing was offshored. That is good for some reason. I thought they were good jobs . But again no regulation, cheap labor, and little environmental regulation won out again. But all these people should just get advanced educations and make themselves essential to some company.
IT and computer work is offshored. They do it cheaper. So all the computer techs, programmers and engineers who lost their jobs can take solace in knowing a corporation has greatly increased profits.
Autos are mostly made abroad now. I guess that too is good. It frees all those workers to get PHDs and make a great life getting educated for jobs that don’t exist.
Eventually wages will level across the globe. Our workers will face steady and gradual cuts . Then it will be our time again. Except education in America is getting so expensive and getting more expensive that it too is becoming the property of the upperclass.
America is being remade by corporations and it is not pretty.
So you think that Germany has a reputational advantage that allows the to sustain their heavy industry desspite labor costs taht are among the highest in the world? I thought there might have been some protectionism involved.
Are they forcing people to pay substantially more for cars, heavy equipment and engineering services? Putting guns to our collective heads? AFAIK, people pay more for German goods and services because there is perception that it’s high quality and high engineering. While I have no doubt that Germany has some protectionism in their system (so does the US), I seriously can’t see how that makes their high priced goods and services in demand outside of Germany. And it’s this willingness to pay top dollar that allows the Germans to charge top dollar…and so pay their workers more (though you do realize that German companies ‘outsource’ to the US, right?).
Rather than insult other people about what you think they don’t see or that they don’t realize, why don’t correct the error you continually make? We just went thru the biggest fucking recession in most people’s lifetimes. Those people standing in the unemployment line were not the victims of creative destruction, or automation or increased productivity. They were laid off in a downturn, just like what happened in every other recession we’ve had.
As for people who actually do lose their jobs due to creative destruction… well, if it were easy to know what industries would be coming along to pick up the slack, we’d all make millions in the stock market investing in those companies.
You real complaint, boiled down to its facile essence, is that neither you nor anyone else can predict the future.
So, what’s the OP’s solution? Make workers less productive? Pay them substantially less or, more importantly, give them less benefits? I’m thinking…not. So, how do you entice (or in the case of the OP, force) companies to bring all those low wage high volume jobs back to the good ole USA? By isolationism…that’s what the OP is really getting at. Imposing such high tariffs on imports of anything that uses low wage labor (and, presumably on imports that don’t, since I don’t see the OP allowing European goods and services in either, since in many markets they ALSO out compete US flagged companies as well). Leaving aside the economic ruin this would cause not just in the US but around the world, and the fact that there is no way in hell you could ever do this fantasy BS the OP is spewing, what does he suppose this would do to prices? In the short term what it would mean is dollars chasing too few goods (there is a term for this…just…can’t…remember…). In the medium term it would mean everyone would pay higher prices for everything, since we’d be thrown back on our own resources (no imports, right?). In the long term (assuming the world recovered and the US didn’t completely crater) we’d be a modern day Japan in a fairly short period of time.
The real trouble is the OP simply doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about. He’s spouting populist isolationist BS as if it were fact, and ignoring literally centuries of data to discounts his ideas. And he keeps asking the same questions, over and over again, and starting the same OP over and over again…as if through repetition he is going to make his fantasy into a reality.
What insult? That word does not mean what you think it does. You seem to continually have a problem with me talking to someone like they talk to me.
Correction. We just went through a reality check that inflicted a vast structural change in the whole nature of our economy. This was a recession caused by consumer spending rules being snapped back to the land of sanity. It is not just a recession - it is going to be a lasting darkness.
You’re not looking very deep at the causes of this downturn.
This downturn was caused by a massive consumer debt bubble which was caused by DECADES of falling (against inflation) wages and anemic job growth as a result of the creative destruction of offshoring and rapid increases in productivity: as a result even with these so-called emerging industries, we’re adding more people to workforce than we are adding jobs. This has just come back to roost.
We suffered a recession because industry innovations across the board are making workers less and less necessary (creative destruction) so we have more people with less money to spend. And this got exposed when access to credit just went down the shitter.
The worst is yet to come. I can and do predict that much. And in fact I am betting my ass on it. I’ve got solar on my house and I’ve made friends with farmers, among other things.
I didn’t profess to have functioning eyes, can you point to where I said that?
So are you suggesting that we shouldn’t have unemployment benefits? What exactly is your issue here? I, personally, don’t care what those people do.
[anecdote] Of the dozen or so people I knew that got laid off in 2008 most took time to travel, something they couldn’t do while employed. The rest took the opportunity to get a masters or MBA. One started his own business, another lived with her parents using her savings until she found a new job 6 months later. [/anecdote]
You’re wrong, again. It means US companies remain competitive and healthy, which will allow them to re-hire when the recession ends. Think about this recession like seasonal unemployment.
Is it? We actually had a huge dip in inflation rates, with some deflation. Near record low interest rates. Unless you think house prices are still going up? Are they? Gas prices, are they higher or lower than in 2008?
My issue here is we’ve got Republicans up on the Hill fighting unemployment benefits and taking it hostage in order to cut taxes and shut down the Government in the process.
There lies your problem - you’d better care. Those people will simply resort to stealing or other chaos. Or is your whole point that they should just drop dead?
But they don’t re-hire the unemployed. This is where you aren’t keeping up with current events. Companies are now saying the unemployed should not even apply for work. This is a permanent change.
Not for those who lost their jobs. Their cost of living went to infinity.
Sigh
But wages went down, too, so the cost of living is not really any lower.
Gasoline is higher now than any time OTHER than the July 2008 spike.
