I’m more-or-less on board with this, with the caveat that you have to watch out for working conditions, too. It’s all well and good for India to get a bunch of outsourcing work, as long as it also leads to improved living conditions. The problem is when you have the people doing the outsourcing also influencing the politics of the country doing the working, which has happened before. Not that that means we should completely scrap globalization, but it’s something to watch out for.
Not really. One of the principles of comparative advantage is that we don’t really care WHY we can buy certain goods cheaper overseas - just that we can. Unless you think we should interfere in the social organizations of other countries for moral reasons, but you don’t really want to open that can of worms, do you?
Or let me ask you - why is it that anti-globalization types always want to link trade to the treatment of workers in other countries, but they don’t want to link other things to it? Why don’t we stop giving aid to countries unless they improve conditions for their workers? Why don’t we kick them out of the UN until they play nice? Or we could refuse to give them military aid, or refuse to allow them to participate in various global initiatives?
No one ever says, “Cuba should not be allowed to participate in the Olympics until they pay their workers a fair salary!”. It’s always tied to trade. And why? Becaus it’s often used as a back-door way to implement protectionist policies to protect high-paying domestic jobs under the guise of human rights. And the ultimate result is exactly the opposite of what you intend - cutting off countries from trade if they can’t maintain 1st world labor and environmental standards is the most effective way to keep those workers poor forever.
Sorry, I phrased that poorly. I meant that the company, McDonalds, has been lobbying against the minimum wage laws throughout the entire history of the company.
I have to run now, and will be back later answering a whole bunch of questions. I do want to thank **msmith537 **for being one of only two posters on this entire thread for quoting any portion of my OP other than the title and the last line.
If and when you come back, something to think about:
The “market” doesn’t create jobs. What the market does is say “there are now a bunch of freed up resources (iew unemployed laborers) and there are a number of needs and wants that aren’t being met in society. Is there any way to bring them together?”
That doesn’t mean it will automatically happen without help. Society might have a need for more lawyers and plastic surgeons, but a bunch of unemployed farmers or factory workers will not be any help without extensive training and schooling.
Most of it is driven by misguided or self interested politics.
Sorry for reducing your lengthy and carefully constructed OP to just a couple of lines, but I’m afraid the top and bottom of your OP are the only relevant parts. No one has cause to object to your description of the ways in which many types of jobs are being automated, or even to your assertion that manufacturing and service industry jobs in general are headed towards automation.
The objection, phrased many different ways so far, is that you are asking for “hard evidence” that the world will continue to function in fundamentally the same way as it has throughout all of recorded history. There are many specific facts which point to emerging job markets which will employ those working in fields that are currently being phased out, but basically we’re relying on induction: throughout history, labor freed up through technological obsolescence has found new employment, often in fields which could not even be conceived of when it was first made obsolesent.
Could it be different this time? Yes. Have you provided any reason to believe that tomorrow’s obsolete service and manufacturing workers are in a worse position than yesterday’s obsolete farmers and horse carriage designers? No. Why is the sky falling **this **time? Keep in mind that the disappearance of extant jobs and the lack of obvious and sufficient replacements is **not **an answer, as that has generally been the case for at least the past 150 years.
Uhh, yeah.
Sorry, I’m still going to ask for a cite.
Actually, I was busy answering other posters, and when Lemur866 posted it, I thought I could answer you both.
[Personal attack deleted]
Sorry, I think you misunderstand my point. I’m not saying we should watch out for countries with poor working conditions, and avoid trading with them, I’m saying we should watch out for people in first world countries interfering with politics in third world countries in order to then benefit from the resulting prices. In other words, it’s one thing if the natives want to trade gold for beads, quite another if they only ‘want’ to after you shoot a couple.
ETA: also, I’m not calling for only trading with countries that have decent living conditions - rather, I suspect that generally, sending tech support jobs overseas causes a rise in living conditions.
Obviously, I disagree. I wouldn’t have written the rest of it if not for the original thesis.
Well, thank you for that. Just so I understand, you accept that manufacturing, service industry and retail are all moving towards automation. OK. Can we agree that this will cause the loss of millions of jobs? If so, the part that everyone seems to be having a problem with is that I have the nerve to ask where are the jobs that are going to replace these millions of lost jobs.
I wouldn’t phrase it that way. My claim is that automation (and outsourcing) replaces jobs in ways that would require only a small fraction of the current labor force. There should be some evidence of these new jobs. Someone mentioned computers and high tech. I agree that there are more programmers now than before, but the profession has existed for decades (centuries if you count Ada Lovelace). I’m trying to think of a recent, newly created job category that had no precursor. Web developer? A hybrid of programmer and graphic designer. What else?
I’ve no doubt that the new Administration will do their best to encourage the development of new jobs in alternative energy. But the factories that produce solar panels, for instance, will be as automated as any on the planet.
Examples, please.
Because, while the driver of a team of horses was able to learn to drive a truck, an autonomous truck that will be able to drive to a specific location eliminates an entire category of work. For instance, the BLS predicts the current 3,356,000 people employed as truck drivers will grow to 3,614,000. As I said in the OP, the Department of Defense plans to have one-third of their vehicles capable of doing that job autonomously by 2015. Fairly clearly, the BLS is not including the effects of automation in their calculations for this particular area, and are simply extrapolating existing data assuming no fundamental change in the nature of the work.
Earliest cite I can find is 1974, in the book McDonalds: Behind the Arches. Sorry, it will take a bit more searching to find evidence going further back than that. It’s not something they go out of their way to publicize.
What you don’t understand is that jobs are destroyed all the time. When you read that the economy gained 100,00 jobs, or lost 100,00 jobs, you’re seeing the NET effect. In any given quarter, even in good economic times, hundreds of thousands of jobs are lost. It’s just that even more new ones are created.
You are focusing only on the job loss side, and claiming that that tells the whole story. It doesn’t by a long shot. As for us having to prove to you that new jobs will be created… Sorry, but that’s the null hypothesis. All evidence and theory we have says they will be. You’re the one making the extraordinary claim that somehow from this point on the economy will function in a bizarre way that has never existed in the past. The burden of proof is on YOU.
Sorry, but as far as I can tell, not one poster has offered any evidence that my thesis - that automation and outsourcing will continue and will eliminate a huge number of jobs - is not correct. Nor has any of them offered any evidence of what sort of job will appear to replace them.
Lots of posters have provided evidence that your thesis in incorrect, by citing specific examples of exactly the same things resulting in no net job losses over the course of more than a century of the history of industrialized economies. There isn’t any other evidence that can be offered, because there is no other possible evidence. We can’t predict what jobs will be invented in 2018 for the rather glaringly obvious reason that they won’t be invented until 2018, for Christ’s sake. You haven’t specifically responded to any points. You’ve yet to explain how it is we replaced all those agricultural jobs.
What else do you want? A crystal ball? Sorry, no fortune tellers here. Including you.
You are the one making the extraordinary claim - that industrialized societies that have been replacing jobs lost to automation and economic efficiency for generations will stop doing what they have always done. The responsibility is yours to support your case with objective evidence because you’re the one making the unusual claim. Examples of automation simply aren’t good enough, because examples of automation elimninating jobs have existed for centuries - you cite some yourself - and they did not result in net losses of jobs. Provide evidence why automation will result in a net job loss today when it didn’t at any previous time in history.
There’s a good reason the Luddites have such a bad rap.
When I was a very young whippersnapper, here was the employment count in these industries:
Computer chip makers: 0
Home computer equipment makers and sellers: 0
Fax machine manufacturers: 0
Celphone manufacturers: 0
Auto tape or disc players makers: 0
Color TV makers: 0
Digital camera makers: 0
VCRs and DVD recorder makers: 0
Digital clock manufacturers: 0
Laser printer assemblers: 0
Automated long-distance telephone equipment makers: 0
Internet service industries and ISPs: 0
Web designers: 0
Credit card processors: 0
Camcorder makers: 0
Multitrack audio recorder manufacturers: 0
Stereo sound equipment makers: 0
Answering machine manufacturers: 0
Personal watercraft makers: 0
Electric car repairers: 0
Foreign car repairers: nearly 0
LCD and LED display manufacturers: 0
Memory chip fabricators: 0
Electronic calculator producers: 0
Printed circuit board fabricators: 0
Barcode readers: 0
Employees of overnight shipping companies: 0
Workers in commercial jet assembly lines: 0
FM radio station employees: 0
Portable solid-state music player makers: 0
Polyester-cotton blend garment manufacturers: 0
Low-wattage, efficient fluorescent light bulb assembly lines: 0
Oral contraceptive pill makers: 0
Polio vaccine makers: 0
TV news reporters, anchormen and talk show hosts: almost 0
…and a lot more. All these jobs were created by the market. The market giveth and taketh away, and the net result is an overall improvement.
So while you lament about all the lost jobs for obsolete industries, think of the jobs gained by the above.
Here’s another way to think about it:
Automation replaces labor when the automation is cheaper than the labor (duh.) However, if unemployment gets too high then the unemployed laborers become willing to work for cheaper wages. There are always fluctuations but if the government was hiding huge numbers of unemployed all those people would become desperate to find a job. The fact that we continue to automate is proof that progress is not putting millions of people out of work.
Again, please describe these new jobs. New jobs that cannot and will not be accomplished via either automation or outsourcing.
You’re claiming the economy will somehow create new jobs, right? And, as far as I can tell, you agree that automation and outsourcing will continue and expand. So, these new jobs will have to be ones that are resistant to both automation and outsourcing.
Am I to conclude that you simply can’t think of any?
The new jobs which will arise in the years to come haven’t been created yet; it would be very difficult to describe them in any great level of detail. Can you imagine anyone X many years ago successfully predicting many of the jobs which have arisen in modern times, for suitably large values of X? The one constant history has shown is that later generations have different things to spend their time doing than earlier ones, and with everyone eventually agreeing the world is better off when things switch from requiring great exertion of labor to produce to being trivially, easily obtainable.
Oh, for God’s sake. You’re just not getting it.
Okay, okay, here’s a new job that will be created. Crystal sculptor. After the sentient monkey wars of 2020, people developed an intense interest in crystal monkeys. They were all wealthy, because they could make things with the push of a button that used to take a year’s labor. So now the ‘in’ thing is to have hand-sculpted crystal monkeys. Millions of people make a living carving crystal monkeys.
How’s that?
The point is, and which you are not getting, is that humans don’t have a fixed set of needs and wants. These change over time. Do you ever think about your grandparents, and wonder why they weren’t miserable and lonely and bored to death the way you’d be if you had to teleport back to that time and live without computers, cell phones, the internet, HDTV, DVD’s, and cable TV? If I had to go back and live in that time, I’d go crazy. I’d feel mentally isolated all the time. But I actually lived though some of those times when that stuff wasn’t around, and I didn’t miss it at all. I thought it was great when I got “hello world” printed on an ASR-33 teletype. Whoo hoo.
Times change. Values change. Our desires change. They change to match the reality of the time. It’s entirely possible that the vast majority of jobs we currently have will no longer exist in 2050. But we will be doing different jobs. If automation makes some things dirt cheap, we will begin to value goods that are not made by automation, simply because they are then more scarce. We do this today - DeBeers has managed to convince people to buy mega-thousand dollar diamonds for no other reason than to display your wealth. And for some bizarre reason, we do not value commercially manufactured diamonds as much, simply because they are manufactured, and therefore not as ‘special’.
Perhaps in the future we’ll be so wealthy that we’ll all make a living offering services to each other - golf buddy, tennis partner, teacher of whatever it is you happen to do well, whatever.
We just have no way of knowing. Maybe we’ll suddenly all decide we have a burning need to go into space, and we’ll create zillions of jobs in a completely new industry.
Hell, maybe it will turn out that the next economy will be carried out completely online. There are already people earning real money designing and selling virtual clothing to people in massively multiplayer online games.
The future is unknowable. If we could tell you exactly what job will exist a year from now that doesn’t exist today, we would all be making a fortune in the stock market. But we can’t. We can see some trends that seem reasonably predictable in the short term - there will be continued flight of low-value labor jobs from the United States. I don’t see garment manufacturers making a huge comeback in the U.S. any time soon. These jobs are going away because Americans are too valuable to do them. Their labor is better expended in areas where they have greater comparative advantage, while they let someone else make their t-shirts for them. No one laments the lack of subsistence farming jobs in America - you hope for something a little better than that. Well guess what? Sitting on a sewing assembly line is now one of those jobs, or close to it. That’s the way life goes.
You’re actually citing the number of high-tech jobs in the Bay Area in contrast with the population of the entire United States as proof that people aren’t really employed?
If asininity with statistics had some market value (and I’m sure it does in some limited circles and ways), I would encourage you to exploit some first-mover advantage in starting up a faulty-statistics consulting firm. That ought to create a few jobs for people that otherwise wouldn’t have been employed as statisticians…