Real wages have been stagnant for large segments of the workforce for damn near three decades. The problem isn’t that our economy can’t create new jobs. Our economy does create new jobs (when it’s healthy). The problem lies in the quality of the new jobs that are created. American workers have seen large productivity gains, but the increase in output wasn’t shared across the whole population. It was given to the richest among us, and exactly as you say, everyone else was asked why they couldn’t appreciate how awesome the economy was when they weren’t being given the fruits of that productivity.
My problem with the OP’s statements is that they don’t deal with any of those facts. They come from a fantasy world, and that’s a tragic digression from the actual problems that we were facing even during good times. gaffa’s arguments couldn’t be more intellectually bankrupt if they’d been thought up by Wall Street bankers. And I just don’t see how it’s possible to have a reasonable discussion about the facts in the same place that we have this blind defense of utter nonsense.
So why hasn’t this automation in health care resulted in the collapse of demand for nurses? Why has the demand for nurses skyrocketed in the last few decades?
Boy, and weren’t things better back in the old days when LASIK surgery was done by hand? Kids today, with their computer controlled LASIK surgery, putting honest LASIK eye surgeons out of work!
You honestly can’t understand how these advances are GOOD things? Automating health care processes doesn’t put health care workers out on the street, it allows us to have higher levels of health care at the same price.
Take a look at employment in the health care sector. According to you all these automated advances and outsourced diagostics should have led to the collapse of the job market in health care. If you would take a second to try to figure out why there are more jobs than ever in health care, you’d have figured out why everyone else in this thread disagrees with you.
Call me silly and childish if it makes you feel better. I suppose it is easier than answering even my most recent request, which was:
Name some new product categories invented in the last five years that are not created with with automation or outsourcing. Name some that are employing significant amounts of labor. Not prognostication, just find some new, sizable industry that is currently employing large numbers of employees.
Oh dear, you’ve fallen to that level already? Misstating my argument and hoping that nobody will notice? Point out where in my original post I said that.
Do I have to explain basic economics to you? In order to play golf or travel or buy boats, one needs money. In order to earn money, one has to work. And, as I explained, a huge percentage of jobs are either going to be automated out of existence, or outsourced. So where is the money to purchase this leisure going to come from for the masses automated or outsourced out of employment?
[Digression about Spain deleted]
I’m not asking for that, and you know it. I’m asking for very general predictions of what industries will arise that will employ large number of people. I can only conclude that you are avoiding the question because you can’t think of any and don’t wish to admit it.
Cite?
Please, I really want to see a poll of every university professor and ecomonic expert on this question. Otherwise, act like a grown-up and admit to hyperbole.
As I pointed out in my OP, Amazon is a perfect example of my thesis. They provide a bookstore larger and far more complete than any physical bookstore on the planet. And they have one of the most highly automated order-filling systems on the planet. No need to ship products to bookstores, stock the store, return unsold product. Each order placed by Amazon’s web site is an order not placed at a bookstore or other retailer. Amazon and other web retailers will eventually have the same effect on physical retailers as iTunes has had on physical record stores like Tower.
I can break the rest of your list down if you like, but the gist of it is that most high tech firms and electronic retail has causes a net loss of jobs in the areas where they compete. I’ll grant that most people didn’t have a personal computer and Net connection in 1978, but if considered as the interface to electronic retailing, I believe the combination has cost more jobs than it has created. By the way, I’m typing this on a Japanese computer built in Malaysia, so it’s not as if it created very many US jobs.
Don’t have much to add to this, other than it’s nice to reply to someone who is actually thinking about the subject instead of reciting dogma.
The problem I see with increasing the necessary skill level of jobs is that, like it or not, some folks just plain aren’t suited for high skill jobs. The local Wendy’s employs a kid with Down’s Syndrome to keep the dining room clean. He does a great job and does not seem to be bored with the simple work. When, not if, Wendy’s deploys a robot to handle the job of keeping the dining room clean, what work will he be suited for? Presumably he’s getting at least minimum wage, unless there is some program that allows Wendy’s to employ him at a lower one.
I’ll have to read his stuff. Is it still in print?
The world we’re discussing can wind up as either a utopia or a distopia. I hope for the former, but I fear the latter. If we “follow the money”, I see no reason to believe that business owners have any interest in either employing any more than the bare minimum number of people, or making life better for anyone but themselves.
Skyrocketed? The data seems to say otherwise:
During this period, the number of RNs employed in nursing grew by an average annual rate of only one percent, the lowest of any four year interval between surveys.
There is a lot of advertising for nurses because of two factors:
[ol]
[li]An aging population of baby boomers[/li][li]A very high burnout rate for nurses[/li][/ol]
Nurses leave the profession because of understaffing. You might claim that this is because there are not enough nurses, but the nurses themselves claim that they are expected to care for far too many patients at once.
Would a cite for any of your claims kill you?
More snark. Wow. I suppose it’s easier than thinking.
Eye surgery to correct nearsightedness had previously been RK, which had dramatically worse outcomes, more patient complications, required much more surgeon and nurse time and patient recovery. I know a bit about this area because I have created 3D animations of LASIK and RK for a leading eye clinic. I’ve looked at outcomes data, and have some idea just how efficiently one surgeon can handle a large number of patients.
Strawman. Argue against what I actually said, please.
I’ve never denied that health care has improved, or that, in general, products and services get better. What I’m saying is that the modern business practice are unlikely to produce new jobs to replace the jobs they have eliminated.
In some, limited areas. For most Americans, health care has gotten more expensive, rather than less. If you have contrary data, I’d like to see it.
Eventually, it will.
Japan and the UK are deploying robotic systems throughout the health care field. The main factor limiting deployment is not ability, but legal liability. But the Lasik system has proven to have better outcomes than hand operations. The da Vinci system should prove to have better outcomes as well.
Based on the familiar names in this thread, most are hard-right cheerleaders for whom Adam Smith’s invisible hand can do no wrong. I’ve been looking at this area closely for several years, and my conclusions are based on observations and collecting data. Try it.
But…but…your own cite has a nice chart right at the beginning showing a steady increase in nurses while the unemployment line has been statistically flat.
Read the text in addition to looking at the chart:
The years between 1996 and 2000 marked the slowest growth in the RN population over the 20-year period between 1980 and 2000. On average, the RN population grew only about 1.3 percent each year between 1996 and 2000 compared with average annual increases of 2-3 percent in earlier years. This slow down in growth reflects fewer new entrants to the nurse population coupled with a larger volume of losses from the nurse population than in earlier years.
I don’t know what counts as a “skyrocket”, but 1.3% growth is not it.
44% of hospital administrators say they have trouble recruiting nurses. Reading through nurse discussion forums, burnout from overwork seems to be the main reason they leave the profession. Which would be the fault of the hospital administrators.
I don’t gamble, but I’ll consider it if you answer the challenge I posted earlier:
Name some new product categories invented in the last five years that are not created with with automation or outsourcing. Name some that are employing significant amounts of labor. Not prognostication, just find some new, sizable industry that is currently employing large numbers of employees.
But where we disagree is that a considerable cause of that increase in productivity is increased automation.
Different discussion. A worthy one, but a different one.
Please elaborate. My argument is a simple extrapolation of existing trends. Don’t just say I’m wrong, show me that these trends are not going to continue.
I genuinely can’t reconcile your two paragraphs. We both agree the American worker is getting screwed, we just disagree how? Actually, I agree that they are not sharing the result of increased productivity, so we’re together there. But, for the life of me, I don’t see why you so violently reject the idea that automation will continue to the point where it causes considerable unemployment.
It doesn’t matter if growth is “only” 1.3% on a slow year. The fact that the total number of nurses increases every year utterly refutes your example about nurses being replaced by automation.
Farther down in your cite is a chart showing average salaries adjusted for inflation. It’s steadily going up. If nurses were being thrown out of work because machines are taking their place then wouldn’t you expect their wages to be going down?
Define “automation.” Is anything made with any sort of machine an automated manufacturing process? Define “outsourcing” - what constitutes outsourcing, and how is that different from merely purchasing inputs?
I suspect that no matter what example I provide, you’ll claim “Automation” or “outsourcing.” But define your terms and we’ll see.
Slow year? The quote you included mentioned the years 1996 through 2000. That is not a year. That’s five years.
Again, this whole side discussion is about another poster’s description of the number of nurses “skyrocketing”. They are not.
No. Why would it? If you expect fewer employees to do more work, in the case of nurses having to care for an ever growing number of patients (made possible via automated monitoring), a shrinking pool of new entrants into the field and 44% of hospital administrators reporting difficulty recruiting nurses…of course the older, more experienced nurses are going to get paid more. Which will increase, not decrease, the drive towards automation.
if they have trouble recruiting nurses it seems to follow there is a shortage of nurses and people could find jobs as nurses which seems to contradict your position.
The fact is that America has steadily been importing nurses from other countries due to a shortage of American nurses. It has also been importing farm laborers, restaurant dishwashers, etc. Maybe it’s just that there are certain jobs which Americans would prefer not to do.
I have not expressed any facts or opinions about the underlying causes behind the increase in productivity from American workers. You cannot possibly know “where we disagree” on this topic, because I have said nothing about it.
No, your argument is not a simple extrapolation of existing trends. Your “trends” do not, at present, exist. To make the obvious, though perhaps trivial point, the reality right now is recession. A simple extrapolation of recession is depression. There is rising unemployment, but it’s not because factories are shutting down in the US and opening in China, or that corporations are replacing vast swathes of workers with robots. It’s because factories (and other businesses) are simply shutting down and not reopening anywhere.
But in addition to that basic note about the state of our present economy, your argument is not an extrapolation of times before the recession. Automation and outsourcing have existed for a very long time. And yet we were at full employment before the recession. To use one large example: Wal-Mart has been pressuring its suppliers to lower prices for decades now. The big wave of outsourcing, the one that swamped the news, started in the 1980s. And yet despite this displacement of American industry to foreign shores that has been happening in headline-catching ways for oh-so-long now, we still managed to stay at full employment (whenever we weren’t stuck in recession, that is).
Suffice it to say, you are not extrapolating from past or present experience. Quite to the contrary, you are claiming that our entire past history will be the opposite of our future. You are claiming that the coming trend, the one we haven’t seen yet, will be a sudden and dramatic reversal from everything we’ve seen to this point. And you’ve given no evidence of this sudden and dramatic reversal expect to cite two forces that you claim will become overpowering, despite the fact that these two forces have long been a part of our economy, and that our economy has always been able to attain full employment even given the long presence of these two forces.
I’m trying to be mostly nice here, but I need an accurate way to describe the quality of your argument. I’m going to stick with “poor” right now, with the option to double down on stronger terminology for your argument if you continue to blindly defend it.
Essentially, yes. I wouldn’t use the word “screwed”, at least not without specific examples of shafting, but I would say that many workers aren’t receiving what’s due them.
This is the main source of my frustration from this thread. You are distracting attention from genuine problems, and drawing attention to figments of your imagination. If we continue your discussion, we could maybe fix the economy that exists in your head, but we would do nothing for the real problems of real workers and real families, who are my primary concern.
I violently reject the idea because it makes not a lick of sense. There’s no reason to believe that the processes by which industrialized and industrializing economies have consistently functioned for centuries have mysteriously changed overnight.
It is certainly possible that one day machines will be able to take over almost all of our work. But that’s a recipe for a robo-commie paradise, not a world of misery. If that miraculous technology ever appears, I’ll be a happy pinko in a productive wonderland as I rely on harder drugs and more fornication to pass my days. But until then, I’ll continue to believe that the economy works pretty much as it has worked in the past.
And in the meantime, I’ll be investigating the stagnation in real wages while pondering the possible causes and solutions of excessive income inequality. These are problems that happen to actually exist, and as such, they deserve more of my attention. I don’t want to cause any major hijack to your thread, but to give a short start: I think it’s quite likely that this income disparity has been fueled in part by globalization. My concern, then, is how to begin balancing out the situation without dampering the productive powers of the economy as a whole. There just might be a way that we can spread the fruits of our productivity gains to all segments of our population while not creating disincentives to create more innovation and production.
Unfortunately, we won’t be able to untangle any of these real world issues if we spend all our time fighting phantoms.
I remember some business leaders and stock analysts, during the height of the tech stock bubble, saying that with the new increases in information technology and productivity, we’d never suffer an economic slowdown again. They were wrong, of course, and for the same reason predictions of doom because of outsourcing and automation are wrong–assuming our current time is special. The details may differ, but the fundamentals have not changed.
The economy always adapts to new technologies and circumstances. No boom or bust is eternal.
All the stuff you’re talking about shows the difference between creativity, which is going to be usually customized and designed for niche markets, and production, which is going to use mass production techniques for small lots. We have processors for which runs of a million are considered low volume, but we also have FPGAs. As designs these are lot size 1 (or a few) but used a mass produced platform.
At the highest level design will never be automated (though it is already outsourced) but lots of the highly skilled stages of the design process have gone away. When I started people drew schematics and wrote netlists, now it is all high level design languages, and I know good designers who have never even read a netlist. Your processor example works also, since the stuff done by plunking a processor into a washing machine and doing some programming used to be done by one-off hardware design.
That guy’s job is probably safe. My wife worked in a vegetable cannery, and they hired lots of people for the line who did things like put bits of bacon into the beans. These were really nice people, and making a decent wage, but were not waiting for their graduate school application to clear. Those are the people at risk today.
I just checked on Amazon, and they have a bunch of stuff, mostly used. I have a big collection of his stuff in Ace doubles and as Analog serials. Amazon even is selling a paper on the economic and social philosophy in his work. IIRC, Mack was a red diaper baby, and traveled widely, so his background was a lot different from the average Analog writer.
I’ve slogged through this whole thread, and I have to say that I am amazed at how otherwise intelligent people can come to hold completely unsupported conclusions and beliefs. The OP’s beliefs are reminiscent of the belief in communism, which on the face of it (“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” per Marx’s slogan) sounds good, but is completely unworkable in practice for any group larger than a few people. (Whereas capitalism sounds like a recipe for disaster, but generally works very well.)
I agree that someone certainly needs basic economics explained to them. :dubious:
America has been importing farm laborers because it is legally permissible to pay farm laborers less than minimum wage. To claim that Americans just “would prefer not to do” those jobs for less than minimum wage indicates an astonishing level of at best, obliviousness, at worst disingenuousness.
I suspect there is work available for you at Fox News as a commentator.