I spent almost two years unemployed, even with advanced degrees in management and technology. A long two years.
I wallowed in the recession; I wallowed in the offshoring trend.
Now, I am casting about for any kind of positive news on the technology/jobs front.
One thing I have observed in my recent employment (large finanacial services company) is that outsourcing is very difficult. Offshoring is even harder.
It’s not so much the networks and systems that are problematic. It is the people, and even more, the processes. I am currently trying to lay hands on some NPV analyses of off-shored projects. If I’m right, the labor costs are not going to be the sole determining factor.
Anything having to do with the elderly, since the Boomers are starting to get old.
Housecleaning services, maybe low-priced taxi services, and ANYTHING having to do with diabetes in any way, shape or form. I imagine nursing homes and retirement villages will be big, too, as the Boomers don’t have as many children to take care of them as their parents did.
The reason why the medical and academic world employ so many foreigners is not that native-born Americans can’t compete in those fields, but rather that they don’t choose to compete. A starting doctor or college professor earns the same amount of money and benefits, regardless of whether they were born in the United States or elsewhere. Supposing you could time travel back to 1995, if you looked at young Americans with the brainpower and work ethic to succeed in the technical fields, you’d find more of them thinking “I’ll get a computer science degree so I can start my own dot com and retire by age thirty”, so colleges and universities had to recruit foreigners in order to get enough qualified students to fill the roles in physics, chemistry, math, engineering, etc… The practical result of this is that today many young doctors and professors are foreign-born. However, I can personally assure you that the academic world is more than happy to recruit talented people from the United States when they show up, and I’d guess that the same is true in the medical profession.
ITRC:Supposing you could time travel back to 1995, if you looked at young Americans with the brainpower and work ethic to succeed in the technical fields, you’d find more of them thinking “I’ll get a computer science degree so I can start my own dot com and retire by age thirty”, so colleges and universities had to recruit foreigners in order to get enough qualified students to fill the roles in physics, chemistry, math, engineering, etc…
Not quite the whole story. In the mid-90’s there were lots of sci and tech academics trying to leave Russia and Eastern Europe, and since many of them were well-known names who were willing to take assistant-professor jobs in the US, they were attractive candidates, making the job market tighter for new US PhD’s.
US grad schools in science have been recruiting foreign students since before the dot-com boom, not so much because there aren’t enough Americans to be professors in those subjects as because there aren’t enough to be grad students. Most universities need grad students in sci and tech (and other) fields to handle routine teaching and research duties at low pay. So in most fields, there are significantly more students graduating with PhDs than will be able to get a tenure-track academic job.
Not to disparage your examples but Switzerland, Norway, Luxembourg (lol), Iceland and Austria aren’t exactly in the US’s league…either population wise or production wise. How about France (9.1% (2002 est.)), Italy (9.1% (2002 est.)) andGermany (9.8% (2002 est.))? Of course, the UK looks MUCH better at 5.2% (2002 est.).
The source is the CIA World Fact Book btw…no idea how accurate it is, but I assume its close. According to this reference the US was at 5.8% (2002). I assume the same slush in the figures ALSO figures into those European powers (i.e. the folks that have ‘given up’ on jobs, etc).
I wasn’t making the claim that ‘other developed nations are economically crippled by their labor regulation while the US is uniquely dynamic and successful’ simply trying to balance the gloom and doom I’m always here on this board about our economy. Have folks lost jobs? Yep, including myself…I was out of work for nearly 2 years when Williams Communications/Nextira One folded. However, a lot of folks still ARE working, and working at what you call ‘good jobs’. Myself…I used to time to go into business for myself.
You have a point about the manufacturing jobs going away, and also that its difficult (to say the least) to retrain. I fail to see what you could do about it though. You state this, but give no alternative to what happens. What COULD the US do to retain its industrial capability? What COULD the US do to retain the tech industry as it was in the boom days of the 90’s?? Again, sanctions? Embargo? Force of arms? How do we MAKE other countries, especially poor ones, have OUR standard of living, OUR work and safety practices, and our salaries. Is it right of us to force our standards on them…especially in light of the fact that its to OUR advantage to make THEM less competetive so we can retain those types of jobs???
From Kimstu
Short answer is, I haven’t got a clue. If I could read the future I’d be rich beyond my dreams…and I dream pretty big. Basically NOTHING will retain ALL the workers in old, obsolete fields. What happened to the buggy whip manufacturers (to use a worn out cliche)? What happened to the majority of the once lucrative jobs on the railroads in the US?? In life there are ALWAYS going to be, through no fault of their own, people who lose out. Thats what our safety net is for…to blunt the sharp edges of our capitalism. However, just because I don’t happen to have the ability to read the future, doesn’t mean that there won’t BE something that replaces SOME of those jobs, and even creates new ones.
As I said before, maybe some US company will come up with a new process for computers that will make all others obsolete (and so capture the market and provide a LOT of new jobs…in the short term at least), or perfect a hydrogen fuel cell that replaces internal combustion engines, or creates a better way to meet the rising demands for information transfer in our society…or myriad other things. I wish I COULD gaze into the future to know…to get in on the ground floor of a potential CISCO (I remember when they were a small two bit company) or Microsoft…companies that employ folks in fields that didn’t even exist 30 years ago.
The point is, the US is one of the leading countries on the cutting edge of technology…just like those other first world nations. A country like that always has the potential to develop new products or processes…and thus create new jobs and oppertunities, until the rest of the world catches up at least. Then they have to move on to something new, or they will fall off and begin to fail. Its an endless cycle of expansion, and a country that decides to entrench and protect its jobs is doomed (IMO) to fail eventually.
I guess my point in all this is, though I’m sure some of you are rolling your eyes at my views through rose colored glasses, I’m doing the same at others looking through dull grey colored glasses. Things are nearly as bad as folks are trying to make them to be, and its not like we haven’t been here before. Historically this cycle has happened over and over again…especially now that a larger percentage of the world are now free to join the game and play as well. If the US fails it will be (IMO) because we tried to protect the buggy whip workers instead of focusing on the future potential jobs from making the car…
xt replied to me: *“what new fields, if any, will accomodate large numbers of displaced workers from the old obsolete fields?”
Short answer is, I haven’t got a clue. *
Then would you mind easing off on your anti-gloom-and-doom pep talks so that others can get on with addressing the substance of this debate? I mean, I appreciate the morale boosting and all that, but you’re taking up quite a bit of posting space for someone who self-admittedly has nothing to contribute to the issue under discussion.
I think that the easy come easy go jobs wont really come this time due to automation. Say we invent some new technology. Most likely it will be either aided by or because of automation making that technology much more easy to do. My buisness is a good example of this. Because basically what we did at www.sparkgameservers.com is automated 99% of the process so all we do is technical/customer support and develop new things for the website.
I was thinking about this when I was listening to my teachers a few days ago. This semester all of my teachers are mostly replacable because all they do is read from slides that they have prepared. If they did a recording of their voice they could pretty much be replaced by that except for the odd question that someone asks.
I think it is inevitable, and that our jobs will gradually shift towards the entertainment industry as well as things like research. I think that the key point though is that we will still be producing the same amount of stuff or we will most likely be producing a whole lot more stuff. The natural employment number will simply be revised upward and we would pay people simply for living in America.
