I’d like to see a cite for that.
Web developers represent a net job loss.
Amazon employs web developers and they have done a great job of creating a solid retailing system. But the point is that every book sold via Amazon is a book not sold in a store. Each hour of labor by their web developer eliminates many times that number of hours of labor by people in physical bookstores. Amazon wouldn’t have started if Jeff Bezos hadn’t thought he could sell books more cheaply. And the main way you can do that is with a system that requires as few human being as possible. We’ll probably continue having physical bookstores for a while because people like to browse. But they are perfectly happy buying music on-line, which led to the bankruptcy of record chains like Tower.
So you claim. but the unemployment rate did not rise between 1993 and 2008. Where did the jobs come from?
But it also causes an enormous increase in the demand for people to deliver books; more packages means more UPS, Fedex, and USPS personnel to handle the load. More WEb traffic means more jobs in the telecommunications infrastructure. It causes an increase in the demand for books themselves, causing more jobs in publishing and writing. If it makes books cheaper than it frees up consumer money to be spent elsewhere to create jobs there.
Again, the unemployment rate has not gone up. Where have all the jobs come from?
Not a new product category, by your definition. Anyway, it also took about twenty to thirty years after its invention to become commercially successful.
Can I go back twenty or thirty years to cite products that have created new jobs? Boy, that’s easy.
There is a better example. The last few things I’ve bought from BestBuys I bought from their website, and then picked up at a local store. I never set foot more than about five feet into the store. Sure BestBuys people still are employed, but if everyone did it like me, why have so many salespeople? As people become more used to electronics, the need to demonstrate stuff for older people still not sure about computers and big TVs will vanish.
An even better example - music stores. I don’t think there is a single store primarily selling music CDs within ten miles of me - there used to be at least 5. Do you think the number of people employed by iTunes and Amazon working on music come anywhere close to the number of people laid off?
PS - the Mack Reynolds book I own in the future universe is Computer World published in 1970. It is about a threat to the data banks of this world, so may be a good introduction.
That must be why the airline industry is awash in cash.
How many customers does the average Expedia agent serve versus the average travel agent in the old days? Reservations were automated 15 years ago also, but only travel agents got access to the system.
Here is a chart showing travel agent employment since 2000, which has been falling in absolute terms. We use a travel agency to book trips at my company, but it is automated and we are strongly discouraged from talking to a person.
As for the benefits, it’s great for consumers, but the mess the airline industry is in comes partially from how easy it is to find the lowest fares. Nobody went to three travel agents to book a trip, but today going to three travel sites is trivial.
On a recent trip we booked 4 out of 5 hotel nights purely on the web, with the one remaining night only booked because the web was out in our room. That isn’t purely a travel agent, it was the hotel central 800 number, but I’m willing to count those guys in the list.
Now that’s the real question. For the past 8 years the “elite” (the top 10%) found it dandy that their incomes skyrocketed while that of everyone else stagnated. Then they were shocked that eventually people stopped buying things and the market tanked - and they lost some money.
We can plan for the situation you mention in advance, or the elite will discover that the income from their companies goes away and they get screwed also. We’re all in this together. We are going to automate for productivity, but the factories will stand idle, wherever they are, if no one can buy their products. Like what is happening today in parts of China.
I DID BUT THANKS!
Straw, by any other name smells of hay…
We have had increasing automation for over a century, yet we have higher employment now than then…as well as higher standards of living. You have yet to address this inconvenient factoid, instead you hand wave on it. Essentially you are trotting out the same tired arguments that the Luddites did when mass production was first coming on-stream.
You also seem to have a flawed understanding of what ‘the market’ actually IS. It’s not some mystical force of economics, it’s not a bunch of capitalist caricatures with top hats and twirling mustaches…it’s you and me and everyone else that buys things. Since you and I and all the rest aren’t likely to stop wanting to buy new and improved thingies, it’s pretty self evident by looking back at historical trends what the answer to your OP is…people ‘insist’ that ‘the market’ will produce new jobs because people continue to want new products and services. WHAT will those new products and services be 20 years from now? Gods know…I don’t have a crystal ball. Maybe there will be a resurgence in auto manufacturing once we settle on a new alternative fuel source to hydrocarbons. China and India build last years technology…they will have to ramp up same as us to build new tech, which will give the US (and Europe and Japan) a window to build market share. New infrastructure would also have to be built. Or maybe some new biotechnology will become available, or new VR cell phone tech or…well, who knows?
The point is that people are going to want those new products and services, and most of the countries that do manufacturing outsourcing are geared up to produce EXISTING products…not products that are cutting edge. Most of their workers are trained to produce existing products as well…not flexible enough to produce new METHODS of production. There would be a window between development and out sourcing.
This has been the historical trend, and it’s the answer to the question asked of you myriad times in this thread which you have refused to answer. There are no indications that THIS time will be any different than all the other times this situation has come up in the past. Assuming we actually weather the economic storm the US will be in as good a shape as anyone else when we come out the other side…and better than some.
It IS a silly level of proof because the vast majority of ANY product involves automation these days. Almost nothing is hand made except gift shop trinkets or very specialized and vertical products. So…it is basically impossible to name new product categories that don’t use automation and use significant amounts of labor because almost NOTHING new DOESNT use some form of automation! Sheesh man…that’s pretty obvious, as is the reason you PUT in those stupid and silly caveats.
Take those caveats out and you know what the answer is going to be, don’t you? It gets back, again, to the oft asked question…what happened to all those farmers at the turn of the century? What happened to all the whale oil producers, distributors, sailors, etc when that industry collapsed? What happened too all the auto workers when automation was put in? What happened to all the ‘by hand’ workers in their cottage industries when industrial production lines were put in place? What happened to all the phone operators and switch board operators when telco automated systems were put in place? What happened to all the 8-Track manufacturers? Why don’t we have 60, 70, 80, 90 or 100% unemployment?? Why hasn’t our standard of living crashed back to pre-industrial standards instead of being flat or rising slightly? If YOUR theory is correct then that’s what we SHOULD expect too see…so, why aren’t we seeing it?
Oh, I read it all right. Slogged through this whole bloody thread in fact and I can see why some of the more knowledgeable posters have already dropped out after giving it a go with you. If someone isn’t reading here I think it’s thee instead of me. As to your assertion that we have been able to ‘grow past it’ in the past but that it’s all changed now…well, extraordinary assertions require extraordinary proofs and I’ve yet to see even common proofs from you that this is the case.
Sure I can…problem being it would be the same list that Sam ALREADY gave you and that you hand waved away.
As for laughable attacks, well…your responses in this thread have been classic. The only one who you are fooling is yourself if you think you are getting your points across…or if you think anyone is paying attention to your martyred stance when people are getting snarky with you.
You (rather conveniently) forgot this part: ‘Name some new product categories invented in the last five years that are not created with with automation or outsourcing.’
If you were REALLY confident in your, um, theory, you wouldn’t have inserted those caveats in…because then you know you would have gotten plenty of responses. By attempting to limit the discussion in the way you have, you are using the exact methods that creationists and other fringe theorists use to make their case appear to be convincing…well, at least to themselves.
Um…sure chief. Whatever you say.
‘The evolushionists haven’t been able to provide a single example of a monkey turning into a human as they claim. Not one.’
I feel your pain.
So sez you…but I find his answers much more convincing than yours, since yours are pure speculation and his are grounded in economic reality. Too each his own though.
Your mistake is that you won’t take your fingers out of your ears and listen to what other posters are saying to you…and that you have a chip on your shoulder about supposed free market fanatics tromping on your pristine theory. The reality is that disputing your assertions doesn’t TAKE free market fanatics, since standard and acceptable economic theory takes care of it quite nicely. A good indication of that SHOULD be that most of the people who have responded to you in THIS thread AREN’T free market fanatics by any means…and yet afaict no one agrees with you.
-XT
The [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_DynaTAC]Motorola DynaTac
[/quote]
was an analog cell phone, the first real portable succeeding the “bag phones” which were re-purposed car phones. It was made in the US and was massively successful. At the time it was introduced, I was working for an electronics retailer and became very familiar with them as each one had to be set up and tested with a cell site “simulator”.
There will always be jobs for humans at least until we develop artificial intelligence that exceeds our own and a Data-like android that can pass for a living person. I actually think the former will be achieved before the latter, which should lead to a very strange world – all activities requiring intelligence or creativity will be taken over by computers, except for those that require a real human body. So humans will all have to find work as live performers, prostitutes, and professional athletes. This will drive the price of such services way down, making it possible for every middle-class household to have its own circus and harem.
The future is one of autonomous vehicles. As soon as feasible, UPS and FedEx will shift to systems that will be able to drive from location to location with no driver. The delivery vehicle would call the business or home letting them know when to expect the delivery or pick-up and the vehicle will be at the dock or curb at that time.
This is not pie-in-the-sky, it’s the logical next step for equipment in currently in use and will be an off-shoot of DARPA’s autonomous vehicle program.
Which is subject to the same economies of improved quality and speed of everything else in electronics. Faster computers with more capacity handling more web sites in fewer rack units.
Publishing and writing, sure. But with innovations like the Kindle and Sony’s E-Book reader, the same thing that has happened to the record retailer will happen to the bookseller. Instead of printing and shipping books to bookstores, the text of the book is edited and readied for market then uploaded to Amazon’s electronic store and copies are sold with little additional labor.
In Japan, at the end of 2007, four of the top five best-selling novels were written on cell phones.
If one buys a bestseller for $9.95 for the Kindle then, yes, it will free up income. But the odds are that it will be spent on some other item that has also been delivered to the consumer using equally efficient methods that will require as few humans as possible. Music downloaded from iTunes, a Pay-Per-View movie via cable or satellite, etc.
Look at newspapers. They have been cutting staff and going bankrupt left and right. But the demand for news has not decreased. At some point, a major newspaper will announce that they are no longer going to print a paper edition. All those jobs in printing and distribution will be eliminated.
Which unemployment numbers? The ones that have been cooked to filter out the “discouraged”? The ones that count jobs of less than 40 hours a week the same as full-time jobs? As I told Kendell Jackson the BLS’ own data admits that one in five workers are working less than 40 hours a week.
I’d love to believe the BLS had the same reputation for independence the GAO enjoys, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. As I dig into it, people complain constantly about how the yearly report is massaged to make things look rosy, with the bad news hidden in appendices released later.
To go back a bit, earlier you had posted:
…and I gave you the benefit of the doubt, saying:
No, that one might actually be valid as the virtual goods and services in the game are being sold in the real world for real money. I doubt it’s employing any significant number of people though.
Right after that, I read an article in last month’s Wired magazine about that topic. WoW has generated jobs. In China. From the article:
With about 30 workers on staff, Liu was able to keep a gold-farming setup running around the clock. While the night shift slept upstairs on plywood bunks, day-shift workers sat in the hot, dimly lit workshop, each tending three or four computers. They were “playing” World of Warcraft, farming gold at an impressive clip by hunting and looting monsters, their productivity greatly abetted by automated bots that allowed them to handle multiple characters with little effort. They worked 84-hour weeks, got a couple of days off per month, and earned about $4 a day, which even for China was not a stellar wage.
Yep. Sound like great jobs!
The efficiency demands on the airlines is a separate issue; some airlines (generally the newer ones) are doing well, others are having problems. Overall tourism has been up.
Cite?
I’m sorry, but showing a cite for the first cell phone and claiming that “every cell phone in the world was made in the US” is weak. Even so, I’ll bet the number of people employed in the US in the cell-phone industry today is many many times larger than the number of people employed in 1983 when the US “made every cell phone.”
Assuming this Popular Mechanics fantasy comes true, we’ll need far more people employed in manufacturing, sales, and warehousing, since the price of transportation will plummet, making it more economical to transport goods, and lowering their price. We’ll need more packaging, so jobs there. We’ll need more infrastructure, and that’s more construction jobs.
I ask you again; If jobs aren’t replaced when automation takes them away, why is unemployment not 90%?
Like all government jobs? My sister works 32 hours a week and makes over $50,000, with 6 weeks of vacation and sweet benefits. She’s been working there for 3 months, so this is no veteran employee with a lot of seniority. ALL government workers here work less than 40 hours a week, as well as in many quasigovernmental organizations, like the post office. Teachers - on the books - work fewer than 40 hours a week. My heart bleeds.
Some people are stuck in bad jobs, of that I have no doubt. Would you please remind me of the time when that wasn’t true?
You can whine all you want about the numbers being cooked. Fine. Let’s assume that’s true. **They still do not explain why the unemployment rate isn’t 90%. ** Almost all jobs have been eliminated from existence - and yet, we aren’t all unemployed.
Contrary to the OP’s assertions the number of people employed (period) is greater today than it was in 1983. Granted the population has risen too…but we SHOULD be seeing this flatten out if the OP’s theory is correct. Certainly the number of people employed in the cell phone industry are greater today than they were in 1983, despite the fact that all those cell phones aren’t made in the US anymore.
Here is an interesting link you can play with if you are so inclined. It allows you to retrieve lots of data about various aspects of labor and even graph it. I’m looking at a chart here that shows the raw number of those employed in the US for the period of 1983 to 2008 and the trend is pretty obvious…and runs in stark contrast to the OP’s assertions. This, despite the fact that US manufacturing and agriculture has dropped quite a bit in that same period. Another interesting statistic you can get from this is employment compared to the ratio of the population…which also has increased btw. Also, check the unemployed rate and check that out over the same period (or any long period).
(apologies if someone already linked to this calculator. I know it’s been linked too in the past since I have the link saved in my bookmarks)
-XT
Yes, at the expense of jobs. No one is denying that automation and the rush to minimize costs increases efficiency - the question is when everyone does it, who will be able to afford to go anywhere?
Ever see the recent airline ads? In the old days, they were targeted to the mass audience, extolling the benefits of air travel. Today they only show first class cabins, preferably on long haul flights where you can get a roomette if you pay enough. My great grandparents came from Russia in steerage, today I go that way even when I travel for business. I don’t think they had to pay extra for their bags, though.
Take a look at page A5, part time employment, and plot part time work because of inability to find full time work. You’ll see an increase after the bubble in 2001, but the level after the 2001 recession hasn’t declined much since. It has spiked since 1/08, naturally, but that was from an already high level.
So, things might not have been all that rosy the past 8 years after all.
I disagree. More travelers generally mean more jobs. Table 14 at bts.org shows that employment is up month-over-month for regional carriers between 2004 and 2008. The gap is shrinking but I think it’s safe to pin that on the over-all economy and not web-sites like Expedia.
Are we reading the same data? The way it looks to me, the number of people who couldn’t find full-time work and had to settle for part time has been pretty much flat over the past 8 years. And since the work force over that period of time has increased, the number of people having to settle for part time jobs has actually decreased as a percentage of the work force.
My wife works in health care, and a lot of nurses work part time. But that’s not because they can’t find full-time work - it’s because they don’t want to. The Union has made part-time work so attractive that many nurses are choosing it voluntarily. Plus, their incomes are high enough that they can live just fine on a part-time salary.
As a society gets wealthier, you would expect the number of part-time workers to increase as people find they have more disposable income and more on the margins would choose to trade some of that income for a shorter work week.
This debate is going nowhere. gaffa is like a person standing outside screaming that the sky is green, contrary to all evidence. His thesis is completely contradicted by all evidence we have, and yet he insists on clinging to it. At this point, you have to just admit that there is no amount of physical evidence or rigorous logic that is going to change his mind.
I disagree. We are in page 5 and that point was reached in page 2, post #74.
It looks flat to me so you must be looking at a different chart than I am. Regardless though the point is no matter how you parse the data it doesn’t agree with the OP’s theories. Do you agree?
-XT
That’s a rather snarky remark, wouldn’t you say?
Which doesn’t change the fact that they have created a great many jobs as well. In fact, many of these jobs that are being exported would not have existed without the computer.