‘Routine’ Jobs Are Disappearing
wsj.com
wsj.com
Remember, the average IQ in the US is just below 100[1]. Exactly what kind of jobs do you expect to retrain these people for? And how are they equipped to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps?
Most of these jobs provided on the job training or apprenticeships so it's not even a matter of "they did it once they can do it again".
Also, many are battling obesity and related illnesses such as diabetes or struggling with mental illness and/or addiction.
We need a systemic overhaul of the economic system and soon. Self driving vehicles will put 3-5 million out of work in the next decade.
Even market solutions will require a lot of gov't interference to work imo (things like job "mortgages" i.e. student loans for adults).
Perhaps some sort of improved retraining program would work, but I don't think we should be dumping money into the existing programs. I should also add that I would very much like these programs to work, and am very disappointed that they don't, as I believe that skilled jobs help the worker lead a happier, more fulfilling life, as well as helping the people who benefit from the work product.
I can't really speak to the second assertion here, but I wanted to chime in from the other side of the first.
I'm a mid level developer (late twenties) and if I could find a job that was 'routine' that paid what I make now, and kept me from having to deal with the public, I would take it in a heartbeat. Programming is interesting, sure, but the days that it's an absolute grind are awful. I'd gladly take a job that would let me stay out of the way of the people who are very much passionate about our shared profession.
Mankind was not made to sit in asinine status meetings and conduct email wars day in and day out.
The best thing for education and job training is for an individual to have a vision of what it is they're working towards. Teach men to build boats by loving the sea, yadda, yadda.
Essentially it is one of those policies that sounds good and appeals to both sides of the aisle. However decades of experience with different programs has shown it doesn't work.
There is even a study mentioned in the book showing a statistically significant negative impact of job training on employment.
https://www.amazon.com/Training-Charade-Collection-Technolog...
It doesn't need to be the whole solution - regular education and training still plays a big part, because many skills are general enough - but there should be some responsibility for a company to help develop the employees that it needs. (Maybe through tax incentives or what-have-you.)
This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of IQ as a measurement. IQ is defined as a normal distribution with a median of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. The average IQ in the US is 100 for any IQ test calibrated to measure the US population. No absolute statements regarding intelligence can be made on the basis of IQs; only relative statements about how an individual fits into the normal distribution measured by the test.
This ignores the flaws in Flynn and Vanhanen's study when it came to calculating IQ scores for different countries. They used incomplete data sets collected at different times using different tests. For 104 out of 185 countries, they had no data available at all. Instead, they averaged neighboring or comparable countries - for instance El Salvador is an average of Guatemala and Colombia while Kyrgyzstan is an average of Iran and Turkey.
I think it is fair to say that the average IQ for $COUNTRY is 100. This is a meaningless statement when it comes to discussing macroeconomics or comparing countries on the basis of IQ.
35% of the US population over 25 has a Bachelor's degree. Assuming that, say, the top 40% in IQ of the total population is capable of completing such a degree and that HN commenters are a randomly distributed subset of that population, that would leave a lower bound for IQ of 104 and a median IQ of 113.
The reality is that IQ is unlikely to be the limiting factor when it comes to whether or not it is possible to retrain large portions of the working population.
No one wants to change careers. I certainly don't. But the economic realities are what they are. It would be nice to change the economy with basic income or government work programs, both of which I'm in favor of. I just don't see how that will realistically happen in the next 10-15 years.
So we need to make retraining great again. Invest time and money into making the process easy, affordable and open to as many people as possible. Maybe we need more schools, or organized apprenticeship programs or maybe teaching robots. This is a problem that has to be solved with innovations in business and/or technology. At least until we can gain the political position to make major changes to our financial and economic ways of life.
[1] https://vimeo.com/127605643 or https://archive.org/details/FarewellEtaoinShrdlu or https://www.nytimes.com/video/insider/100000004687429/farewe...
Do you have any answers?
me too. i also think it's more likely to fail, because there's no way in hell that we can muster enough resources to effectively retrain millions of people in the current political climate-- or the one of the past two presidencies here in the US (just trying to get in front of the partisan bickering, as it's not my main point at all). a half measure isn't going to work here.
>But the economic realities are what they are
agreed. the economic realities are going to be that the people who we end up not retraining due to political inaction are going to be impoverished as they grow older, resulting in their children becoming more impoverished as well. sure, they might try to retrain on their own, but that's a tiny, tiny minority.
>I just don't see how that will realistically happen in the next 10-15 years.
not under our current levels of distractedness and passiveness, no. a tipping-point crisis will crystallize the problems caused by the slow burning of an obsolete workforce. i don't know when that will be, but it's coming.
>This is a problem that has to be solved with innovations in business and/or technology. At least until we can gain the political position to make major changes to our financial and economic ways of life
political positions to solve slow and quiet problems don't tend to materialize before it's too late to do anything meaningful...
my main point here is that a lot of political capital needs to be built regardless of proposed solution. as it stands, the common people are serfs who stand to lose their ability to work the land... i think that it's likely that the concept of american "democracy" itself will enter into a severe crisis as a result of the economic/jobs problems that we're having.
so, where to begin in the rats nest of problems?
But making training the new norm will require big changes to the status quo of how companies retain skilled employees.
First, we need a much better model for skill credentialism. College degrees are way too slow, too broad, and rarely meet the specific immediate needs of business. Some sort of microdegree equal to 1-4 college courses (and more substantial than today's pop MOOCs) sound about right. But their instruction model also needs to be much more flexible and time-insensitive, so working people aren't locked into semester-based schedules. And student social interaction in MOOCs needs to be much improved over the 1990-era forum message chains I've seen.
Second, we need to encourage employers to spend money and time for retraining. And in return, we need to assure them their newly-skilled employee won't soon take their newfound skills and hop to a better paying job. This requires a contract like those between employees/unions and employers in Europe, but largely absent in the US.
Third, employees probably will have to change jobs more frequently. Thus the system needs to make these job hops smoother, steadying employee cashflow to support long-term debt like mortgages, and minimize risks like making health care coverage liquid and independent of employers.
Unfortunately such big changes will require all involved -- employees, educators, insurers, and employers -- to discard their venerated focus on short-term ROI and cost reduction. Unfortunately existing US practices seem almost perfectly unprepared to act gracefully and quickly. While in contrast, Germany, with its longstanding state support for low-cost education, mobile health insurance, union-business partnerships, and skilled jobs that don't require college degrees, seems ideally positioned.
And of course all this has to happen pretty quickly, while we John Henrys can still compete with the machines.
We have millions of underemployed people already, working 30 hours a week at Walmart and similar jobs. It's not like there are millions of jobs just looking for trained people to fill them.
The limits for displaced workers are similar but worse, the margins at both ends for re-training are even smaller, and the payoff periods to provide return on training-investment are much shorter. Companies have basically divested themselves of in-house training because they themselves can't/aren't building financial models to justify the training investment. But somehow individuals with some level of minimal gov't 'help' are supposed to pickup the tab to do it?
In our economic philosophy, there needs to be an a channel that allows for optimization in ways that conventional economics cannot account correctly. E.g. we have to start to differentiate between capital power used to lock-in markets vs the use of power to be competitively offer value to society in the long term. If the profit accounting is wrong, then the optimizations are wrong for society or the physical world and we collectively make a mass of individual decisions in a bubble of financial rules that don't pay off for the whole system.
That's the only to fix economics in the long run in mature economies - otherwise the imbalance of power between capital and labor creates downward pressure on wages that drives the long term destabilization of the entire system.
In reality, it's more like a "death by a thousand cuts".
To give you a concrete example, I work in e-commerce and part of the automation we're building will eliminate 2 full-time jobs on the side of the manufacturer - people who are just entering orders manually, instead of using some form of EDI that forwards the order from the customer directly to the dropshipper. While that sounds insignificant, consider that this is only for a single business relationship between 2 fairly small companies.
There are tens of thousands of companies like this in the US and once those automated systems are in place, those jobs aren't coming back.
Believe it or not, there are still lots of things being done by hand in small and medium-sized businesses, my guess is automation could easily shrink their required labor by 10-15% over the next decade as well.
Also, there's also a lot of resistance (and prejudice) in going from blue-collar to pink-collar, partly because care and health services are seem as feminine jobs(except doctors, of course).
The nursing profession is extraordinarily important, and we underutilize it in this country. Most of us should be talking to "nurses" much more frequently than we do, and much more often than we talk to doctors.
[0] Also known as "physician assistant", which is a terrible name when making a case for autonomy...
The market as a whole needs to come to the understanding that we (a) need a kind of "doctor-lite" for people to go see, and (b) that we have them already: we call them nurses, but should call them something else.
Not many people feel they can switch careers in mid-life to become a doctor. But people routinely go to nursing school for a career switch. It would be good if more people did this, specifically to get NP status.
They have similar education requirements to a nurse and perform (in practice) similar functions.
In a minority of jurisdictions in the US, NPs can practice without the supervision of a physician, whereas PAs, in all jurisdictions, must be in a relationship with a supervising physician. But both PAs and NPs, generally, can see patients and prescribe medications, within state-specified limits, without interacting with a physician in the course of performing that function.
I don't think "assisting doctors" is actually what most nurses do; most nurses work under the clinical supervision of a physician (and that's also true of NPs in a majority of US jurisdictions; there are 20 states where they have "full practice authority".)
In any case, since NPs are RNs with additional qualifications (they are actually a name for some specialities of advance practice registered nurses), it makes sense that they are called nurses.
> Not many people feel they can switch careers in mid-life to become a doctor. But people routinely go to nursing school for a career switch. It would be good if more people did this, specifically to get NP status.
NP status (or APRN more generally, regardless of specialty) takes substantially more education than RN, and a lot of the people who go back to school for nursing don't even get to the RN level, just LVN/LPN. Changing the name isn't going to change that.
Anyway, the non-nurse physician-lite you are talking about isn't the NP, it's the Physician Assistant. While the scope of practice is somewhat similar, the latter is abbreviated training of the type provided to physicians, the latter is advanced training of the type provided to nurses; they are different models. An NP or other APRN is a nurse with advanced training and certification which allows them to do some things without supervision of a physician, a physician assistant is a reduced-qualification physician with a correspondingly narrowed scope of practice. You seem to be interested in the latter, but think that the former is the same thing with a poorly chosen name rather than a distinct and different thing with some overlap in role.
There is no reason someone needs to spend $200,000 and 13 years of his life to say "Oh you're feeling depressed how about an SSRI? Or oh your cholesterol levels are high, how about some Lipitor?"
Nursing has its own tradition and model of education , training, and care that is quite distinct from that of medicine. Nurses aren't medical associates. (And there already is a profession called, depending on jurisdiction, physician associate or physician assistant -- which follows the medical rather than nursing model -- which would be confusing if nurses were renamed medical associates.)
And, given the idea that nurses are increasingly the dominant point of contact, it would make more sense (were we to decide to erase the distinction) to rename physicians "nursing supervisors" rather than the other way around. Of course, confusion with names of existing roles would again be a problem.
Jobs come with a lot of baggage. Could I make a good doctor in an abstract sense? Hell yes, I thrive at diagnosing complicated technical systems under pressure working closely with people. However I am sensitive to lack of sleep and when I inevitably kill someone during my training hazing when you have to work 36 straight hours without sleep, I'd... react rather poorly to having killed them over basically being too much of a coward to say F that hazing tradition. So I can't become a doctor. The problem would be the hazing but the firing paperwork would be some BS like culture fit, and I'm smart enough to predict the whole thing so I'm not even gonna try. A pity, I'd be a hell of a good doc.
Likewise we've loaded the psychology of nursing with certain baggage that only a fraction of the population is going to tolerate. The reason the supply of nurses is limited is not because we lack for the technical ability to learn to give sponge baths or ability to follow surgeons orders to assist them. I think we pretty much have all the people nursing who can fit the precise psychological cookie cutter of stereotypical nurse and folks who don't fit that cutter will have their money taken in classrooms but they'll get weeded out of the field. Leading to "how we gonna retrain these excess unemployable nurses?" and maybe we'll torture them with some other field requiring a unique unusual personality, like psychologist or chef, and when they fail that, we'll collect tuition retraining all of them to be ...
We're only allowed culturally to talk about changing employees never changing the employer or the workplace itself. Which is unfortunately the thing most needing changing now.
So its a forbidden thought to consider that the problem is we need to accept drill sgt like nurses and construction dude like nurses not just nurse like nurses. Or its a forbidden thought that I could become an ER doc without the required lack of sleep hazing. But if you want to actually fix broken systems sometimes you need to at least think about forbidden thoughts.
A world where its safe to question why a nurse can't tell a patient to F themselves when they need to be told to F themselves or where its safe to question why a new doc needs to go thru hazing at the cost of patient lives is a better world. Its not exclusively about convincing students to enter fields where everyone knows they're not gonna fit and then shrugging shoulders when they inevitably don't fit and wash out. Sometimes fields suck and need fixing.
there is a humanitarian case to be made for improved quality of life for elderly people, but I can't imagine that there is a reasonable economic case to be made for it, unless you're arguing that the elder-care industry is just an elaborate substitution for more traditional methods (inheritance and taxation) of redistributing the accumulated wealth of the elderly. aside from that, it strikes me as spiritually corrosive to set up a society in which the young are caring for the old simply so they can pay their rent. this is a kind of gerontocracy.
It seems to me that what is needed is alternative industries that are booming because they create new economic opportunities in a generative fashion. an industry that is booming because the core economic and social dynamics of our society have gotten out-of-whack is not really much of a solid future for people facing job displacement.
To continue my devil-advocacy, I'm sure the above poster wouldn't argue AGAINST elder care on humanitarian grounds, but is instead saying this is not where you want to redirect significant portions of your workforce, because you'll tank value-addition and harm everyone (including those elderly patients).
Personally, I find the argument a little repulsive, but also an important argument to refute. So I'm glad it was raised.
My rebuttal would be that with increased automation we're doing fine in value-addition, and the entire point of having positive wealth creation is to improve the overall well-being of a lot of people (I was going to say "as many as possible", but that might not be agreed to by some). If we skip the "reward" of a society's wealth-creation, why are we doing it again?
That's what I meant when I said I didn't understand the reasoning of the comment --- like, at all, even a little bit.
that might be of some net economic benefit anyway, purely on the basis of freeing up money that would otherwise be stuck in sequestration from the rest of the economy. however, I'm not sure what "flaw" in my economic claim you're trying to point out. can you be more explicit?
I would ask you, however, to actually care more about the non-economic part of the argument. I believe that's the more important part.
Using the definition you've proposed, it's hard to think of any service transaction, from doctors visits to architectural consults, that isn't somehow "redistributive".
If you are comparing the economic effect of a growing industry of elder care to a society where no elder care occurs, then I can see how you might draw the conclusion that growth in this industry is a waste because these are not 'value producing' jobs.
In reality, a society where no elder care occurs is not the alternative as some form of elder care would be taking place. People who work doing elder care are amplifying the productiveness of the friends, family and neighbors who do have 'value producing' jobs.
Personally, I think our current styles of elder care and our ageist biases waste a lot of economic potential and social value by wasting the time of our elders. I think that finding ways to tap this potential while providing better care for our elders would be the OPPOSITE of spiritually corrosive. As it is, many find working in elder care quite rewarding, especially when that elder care happens in less institutional and dehumanizing settings.
a young person seeking employment at the beginning of their career might find it deeply troubling as well (assuming there were not enough good alternatives to working in elder-care), as it represents an inversion of social and economic priority from the future (young people) to the past (the elderly).
Whether a society prioritizes its future or its past is an important social, economic, political, and moral decision. Suppose that demographic trends lead to a massive boom of elder-care jobs that is supported (in the short term anyway) economically and "solves" an employment crisis for the younger generation. Is that a solution worth doing?
You're unhappy that people who were doing a job can no longer do that job, and putting yourself in their shoes when they confront the possibility that their economic best interests are in jobs they don't want to do. That's fine; that is in fact a real challenge in how societies engage with market economies. But it has nothing to do with older people; it has to do with the fact that not everyone can make a living doing the exact job they want to do.
additionally, where do you get off acting as if you're an authority on economics? you're nothing special. stop acting as if you're automatically correct. you have something to say, then say it, argue your point and support it. simply phrasing things as if you're authoritative only makes you seem arrogant. it's not convincing.
finally, by choosing to deliberately ignore what I offered as the more important dimension of my position (the moral one, rather than the economic one) you have derailed the entire conversation into something nearly irrelevant.
in other words, you're not worth the time. we're done here.
We literally pulled an entire nation out of a depression in order to go to war. Fighting a war has to be the least "productive" activity imaginable for humans to engage in, yet we did it and it managed to do the opposite of break the nation's back.
The only criteria is that lots of people need it and are willing to pay for it. The second bit doesn't even have to be economic, a society could simply make it a matter of politics and allocate tax revenue towards it.
You can potentially eliminate unfavorable competition, acquire more land or resources open for exploitation, raid materiel and intellectual patents, all the while reducing the size of the working class and its proportion to the wealth-owning classes.
But this also illustrates how dumb it is to single out elder care as somehow economically unproductive. We pay for elder care because we desperately want our elder family members to be comfortable. If there were labor shortages in this sector, we'd be taking on the work ourselves, at substantial opportunity cost. It's one of the great things about market economies that this work can instead be done by people who have chosen to specialize in it --- they do the work more effectively, at lower cost, and derive more personal satisfaction from doing it.
There is a really weird undercurrent to this subthread that I find unsettling. The availability of elder care services in the marketplace doesn't constitute a "gerontocracy".
that's not what I said and you're now arguing against a strawman.
I said that retraining of displaced laborers to be elder-care service providers is moving in the direction of gerontracracy, and that if the trend is extrapolated enough (perhaps to the point of absurdity, but I was making a speculative point, not a comment about the current state of things) then it is easy to imagine funneling young people into that industry as alternative job opportunities are less and less available. that would be gerontocracy.
Because they don't have any money. Retired people either don't have a lot of money to spend or they tend to be very conservative in their spending since they don't have a regular income. If you want to increase the amount of money they have, you're looking at increased government handouts which come from taxes, which come from the people who are working. BTW I don't consider social security in the US to be a handout, but it does theoretically come from taxes on a persons previous income.
What the hell is the economy for otherwise?
Most of the economy is not based things that grow the pie massively like 'new energy forms' and 'more powerful computers' etc..
It is rather mysterious how we take kids in prime physical shape and mush for brains and lock them into ignorant echo chambers for years while we take wise and skilled old people with worn out bodies and brains full of very expensive experience and lock them into lonely old folks homes next door and then make sure they never mix. Its almost like our culture is so stupidly designed someone is trying to sabotage it.
You'd have to expand the concept of apprenticeship beyond current restrictive beliefs and expand the idea of teachers aide quite a bit. If all some old duffer does is make sure the kids don't tip over an unchained acetylene bottle in shop class, its still worth it if all he does is sip coffee the rest of the semester. Three old duffers stand at the table saw all day doing nothing but safety and technique critique.
Advanced disciplinary procedures are interesting to contemplate. Not so much the return of corporal punishment but you'd be surprised how well kids wanting attention can react to being assigned to work with a team of five old people. You will do your math homework alone or with the five grandmas ...
Note that this is a fair trade unlike your gerontocracy because the kids derive considerable value from the old people.
Where it gets weird is when you mix unemployed people in. Say due to ageism I'll never get paid to write code again because I'd be too expensive or unwilling to work 60 hour weeks. If welfare paid my bills would it be that bad if I did nothing but volunteer computer lab tech all day?
We don't need "the kids to derive considerable value from the old people" to justify these economic transactions.
It's really a failure to think holistically. When you break a problem down and over-specialize, you can turn a solution into two or more problems. I'm reminded of something I read about farming: traditionally livestock production and farming were done on the same farm. The livestock ate healthier and could be of higher quality, and their manure fertilized the soil for the crops. They were separated in the name of specialization and efficiency, and that created problems of agricultural mono-cultures, unhealthy livestock, fertilizer runoff, and the disposal of concentrated livestock waste from factory farms.
Median net worth of a retiree is $210,000. Many have saved for care in retirement and therefore will be able to 'demand' it in the market. And I don't believe that includes income from Social Security (which is just a forced savings plan).
>It seems to me that what is needed is alternative industries that are booming because they create new economic opportunities in a generative fashion.
This is word soup.
do I actually need to explain it to you? I will anyway, in word sandwiches, since you might prefer that instead of soup.
Re-training assembly line workers to be barristas, mall parking lot attendants, and elder-care nurses is not an acceptable outcome. There is increased demand for positions like that in our economy but that is indicative of economic dysfunction, not economic health. Some industries are declining (in terms of labor force participation) because of off-shoring and automation. Those industries are benefiting in profitability from the reduction of their labor costs but the laborers being displaced are not receiving those benefits. New industries that can offer work for displaced laborers are needed. Ideally, those industries are _generative_. That means they are primarily involved in production (of raw materials, of manufactured goods, of energy).
I use it to describe sentences where I can jumble up all the adjectives and get the same meaning - a meaning which is so vague that people can just interpret the sentence as something that conveniently agrees with their prior convictions
>Ideally, those industries are _generative_. That means they are primarily involved in production (of raw materials, of manufactured goods, of energy).
Your prior conviction is that new stuff is needed and intrinsically good. I am not so bold as to hold such a conviction. Maybe people simply need to be enabled to do more with less.
there is huge efforts underway to replace Doctors, Nurses, etc with AI.
the comment I replied to was wanting to take People in Job A, and retrain them for Job B in healthcare as a second career do to Job A being automated. You are not likly to be a Surgeon as a Second Career unless you are already a non-surgical doctor. You are not going to take a welder and make them a Surgeon as a second career most likely.
As such it was implied that Healthcare was a "safe" industry for people seeking refuge from having their jobs automated away. I was pointing out it is not.
Which part would you like to debate?
Is it the "soon" part or do you believe the Surgeon role will be gone entirely?
Even with significant AI advances I'd argue that a Surgeon will still retain at least a guiding role (i.e. what to cut and what to do in case of complications) to the machine.
I mean, a workplace run by people needs a manager for about every five people. A workplace that runs robots needs a manager.
Salespeople only matter if there is someone with money to sell to. I suspect the direction we're going as far as they are concerned are automated goods warehouses that people buy from with self-checkout and a bored troubleshooter/security drone standing by the door. No more shoe salespeople. That leaves enterprise sales, which is a comparatively small footprint, in terms of jobs.
As to bankers, sure they'll be around, but I don't see traditional bankers to be exactly a growing field and they aren't really dying for new employees.
Nope, we're all headed towards serfdom, no two ways about it
Then I shopped for hardware at Best Buy and Comp USA and they had sales clerks who shoved boxes on the shelves matching the UPC code, but they didn't even pretend to know anything. It was somewhat less annoying than Circuit City.
Now I shop for hardware at Amazon because I'm addicted to the free shipping and if its not significantly cheaper at tigerdirect or whatever in another browser tab, well, I'm not going to make a special order. Amazon doesn't have salespeople. I've never talked to a human at Amazon and probably never will. Its even less annoying than Best Buy!
Similar experience with banking. I'm old old old compared to the stereotypical HN demographic and when I was a young graduate I would take my physical paper check to an old fashioned local bank (long since merged into international megacorp) and a friend of mine's roommate was my cashier and I'd deposit that paper check into my account and get a paper receipt. Around the most recent financial crash I moved to a credit union and with direct deposits and ATMs I haven't been inside the building in the decade since... If you assume your average bank user will only spend an hour every decade moving to a new bank/CU, then America doesn't need many bankers, does it?
The middle class is based on a mostly unskilled workers making a great wage because they are producing things that people will pay even more for. Automation has killed that future dream and is rapidly killing what remains of it.
I agree that it makes no sense to turn a welder into a mechanical engineer. The best we can do in the short term is turn them into robot mechanics but that is just buying time (although maybe a long time). Eventually, we have to re-evaluate what life is, can be or should be. I find this future fascinating and terrifying.
This has been brought up previously in HN discussions. It's an artifact of arbitrary binning choices.
Note the "or outsourced" piece. If the prevailing wage in the US is $20+ an hour vs a 3rd or quarter of that in the developing world there is no way the average US worker can compete. While I get the automation argument, that still doesn't explain the large (seemingly majority) of retail goods in the United States are that manufactured in lower labor cost countries. Not everyone is cut out to be a knowledge worker. As much as I personally like tech, this is not going to be the great job creator for Middle America.
There are still a lot of jobs that can't be automated and/or won't be for a long time. If it was possible to automate as much as some would have you believe in the short term straight up there are some robotics companies that would have not closed down (Willow Garage), and you would be seeing a lot more traction with others doing more interesting things instead of telepresence robots and clunky household devices such as the Roomba.
Here's the chart from an earlier paper by the same authors:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/782zelpi8r2nwua/Screenshot%202017-...
So a big question here is about causality. It's possible (maybe probable) that the phenomenon of long term declines in routine manual jobs is in fact the cause of jobless recoveries: it creates a ratcheting effect at each recession.
So it may have nothing to do with 'ups or downs' - just a long term secular trend in those areas.
Recessions just exacerbate the problems a little, possibly.
My understanding has been that it was due to stickiness in both wages and labor demand. That is, a recession is an excuse to cut wages/benefits/hours/headcount that managers either didn't care to cut or were afraid to cut in good times.
That, or it spurs managers to actually innovate and figure out how to do more with less.
If that understanding is even partially correct, it's ironic that labor laws designed to protect employees might actually be contributing to over-corrections in the labor market that directly hurt employees.
https://job-descriptions.careerplanner.com/Welding-Machine-O...
From this job description it seems like a job that is very easily automated, as you're not doing anything interesting, just feeding the machine and making small adjustments.
I think the article is discussing the repetitive, low to medium skill welding and machine babysitting that has been automated or is just plain unnecessary with new manufacturing processes. What's left is the higher skill and un-automatable welding work.
Routine/Manual: Factory line work
Routine/Cognitive: Retail clerk
Non-Routine/Manual: Truck driver
Non-Routine/Cognitive: Software developer
In this scheme, every job falls into one of those four quadrants.
I agree, welding (probably most of the "trades") are "non-routine/manual".
Isn't that how everyone defines it? University educated, cultured, white collar workers? To me, middle-class means a doctor, lawyer, teacher, regulated professionals, things like that.
That is no longer as attainable as it once was. (Neoliberal globalism is part of the problem, but in the US specifically domestic tax reform to shift the burden from upper income earners to lower-to-middle-income workers over time, particularly the enormous shift under Reagan, is more specifically the problem, and not really connected to neoliberal globalization except that there is some overlap in political support.)
Simply not true. The number of people who pay zero income taxes has never been higher due to EITC etc. The top 1% paid about 19% of federal taxes in 1980 and about 39% in 2014.
It is usually more effective to think about this as being more about social capital than monetary capital.
Some welders -- those who own their own businesses or who have very substantial savings and investment as a result of long career -- might be middle class, but most (even if at or above middle income) are working class, deriving their income predominantly from wage labor.
Economic class isn't a categorization of income level, it's a qualitative categorization of the manner in which one derives income.
(It's become popular to use middle class to refer to some middle income segment largely as a political way of masking the near-total collapse of the classical "middle class" and polarization of economic class into working class and capitalist class with very little of the classic "middle class" left. But people like to feel like the middle class exists and is attainable, so calling the upper income segment of the working class "middle class" helps make people feel better. It also serves the capitalist interest in creating separation of identity and preventing solidarity within the working class.)
The relevance of class distinctions which place Uber drivers - whose income is derived from applying labour to their own capital - in a higher economic class than doctors or SV programmers [who haven't exercised their options] is pretty minimal, and it isn't a capitalist conspiracy that other definitions of "middle class" are generally preferred.
The classical economic classes are misleading when viewed as an inherent heirarchy (in pure capitalism, they might be -- at least, capitalists are definitively at the top -- but that is a feature for which pure capitalism has been criticized.)
The classes, instead, represent commonality of interest from common manner of relating to the economy (income level is also a source of potential common interest, but it is distinct from, though correlated with, class.)
And I think there is plenty of room to debate whether Uber drivers are genuinely primarily applying labor to their own capital, or whether the key, predominant, a d essential capital is that provided by Uber.
We need to stop valuing people by what they do and start providing for people regardless of what they do. And you can do this secure in the knowledge that you do it out of pure self interest because if you don't an underclass will come into being on a scale not seen since feudal time and the people in it will have little to lose by being disruptive and violently rebellious.
Note this is how finance has been hiring line engineers for years.
It's the flip side of why high minimum wages cause more unemployment. Some work activities are just not worth $15/hr.
There might be a very local substitute effect where in a small enough area part of a large enough system, almost any arbitrary value can be applied and it'll be filled, as long as its a small enough area and a large enough system. Along the lines of 10000000 monkeys on typewriters might not produce Shakespeare anytime soon but you can expect the occasional short English language word in that stream fairly often.
And if they are not already doing it, how do you 'start with' them?
That depends on if you live in a society that believes people should be free to pursue their 'dreams' or in one that uses work as a measure of a persons worth.
The US is the latter.
People pay lip service to letting people expand their horizons and bettering themselves right before they tell you to get back to work.
Simply because I said the US is an example of one way does not mean other country is an example of the other, which is what the OP I was responding to was talking about. The US is just one of the worst examples of your worth being tied to your work.
Away from the coasts nobody is looked down on for joining the military for a couple years or the peace corps or going for missionary or volunteer work. Go find yourself, go work off some energy, come back calm and ready to settle down. On the coasts, people who do stuff like that are hated, reviled, made fun of.
Hell, I'm looked down at by my in-laws because IT isn't 'real work.'
Choose to try to learn how to play an instrument, or some other artistic endeavor and the first thing everyone will ask you is 'how do you plan to make money with that?' You'll get a lot of 'that's nice dear, but how do you intend to live.' You will be met with nothing but condescension because you are not perusing work. Stick with not working and you'll be 'that weirdo down the street.'
> ready to settle down
And work like an adult because you're not an adult and worthy of being treated like one until you work.
This stuff has been and is tried all the time and doesn't typically work out. It needs a major rethink if we're to invest substantially in them.
Manufacturing used to be a solid living for those who were none-too-bright but capable of semi-skilled drudge work for 8-12 hours a day. More and more, those people are getting left out in the cold. I feel badly for them, but I don't know what the answer is. I was smart enough to go to college and get a degree in something technical, find a job and make good money. Most of my high school classmates would be ecstatic if the old jobs in the paper mills and the shoe shops and the sawmills that their parents and grandparents had were still available.
You starve people enough, hunger drives some interesting responses. If keeping your iphone means watching your kid die, lots of people will totally go for some kind of neo-Amish 1950s revival. Or just go full on Amish. Currently the Amish standard of living is somewhat higher than the general population and that is only going to increase in the future as the median standard of living continues to decline with technological "progress" and environmental change, while the Amish hold relatively constant, which is going to drive lots of recruitment.
If you give a choice of living under a bridge while starving in iphone-land or being a successful carpenter in Amish-land, well, kinda a no brainer choice there...
It is my opinion but I believe this is going to be much harder to fix than just teaching new skills. Specifically for those individuals I described above. We need to fix how we as a country approach education and how our population views it before we can move ahead with teaching those already out of the system, and jaded by it, new skills.
Plus you still have a huge mass of unemployed people who ended up in those jobs because they lacked either the aptitude of temperament to gain skills in the first place, or are too old, poor or poorly situated to take advantage of the opportunity now.
Soon, due to the dearth of people employed, and the shrinking wages of the minority who are, there is no longer enough people left with money to buy most goods and services. As a result, businesses start to shut down, exacerbating unemployment and sending the economy into a contractionary death spiral.
Yes, in a healthy job market, people will gradually retrain and relocate in order to fill demand. But what we're talking about here is a total breakdown in the jobs market, to the point where it becomes non-functional.
It's the difference between supply problems causing the prices of a few foodstuffs to rise, and an unending drought that destroys harvests year after year. The market can cope with the first, but not the second. The result will be famine and mass starvation.
No ones, but they also want to eat, have a home, and provide for their offspring
> As mentioned, take these "prime aged workers" teach them skills, and suddenly we have a spike in actually valuable labor instead of a middle class of unfulfilled office drones stuck in a stupor.
What about the people that can not be taught "skills", what about when the machines take over their skills? What about ... 100 other scenarios I can come up with
>the framing should be look at this amazing business opportunity to onboard high value workers, not cautionary doom.
To do what, exactly? No job is safe from automation. To deny the potential for this new wave of automation to create massive poverty is to deny reality.
We have ti adjust how society functions, how we look at labor, and honestly how we look at human rights.
If we do not, if we hold to the same Social Structure of 40 hours a week with minimum amount of pay as possible all that will be is suffering for the majority, because even in this "utopia" where you can take 100% of the lower skilled worker and magically impart upon them more skills all you have done is flood the market with a greater supply of workers for those higher skilled jobs while no increasing the demand for them. Economics 101 tells up that results in a reduction in the price of that labor, so what was once "valuable labor" is no longer valuable.
Someone who wants to provide for their families, not worry too much about work, and be able to enjoy their weekend?
" IMO, the framing should be look at this amazing business opportunity to onboard high value workers, not cautionary doom."
How?
"As mentioned, take these "prime aged workers" teach them skills, and suddenly we have a spike in actually valuable labour."
In the Uk these social ties are too much to break away from, its easier to stay put and look for work. Unemployment creaps up, zero hour contracts drive wages down. Deprivation sets in. Its a slow downward spiral.
So no Solar is not cheaper when looked at in total cost to supply useable power to people 24/7
Further the cost of Coal is higher today largely because of artificial fees places on it in the form of Carbon Taxes, EPA regulations, etc. While I agree many of these are needed and benifitial to the long term it is this has to be factored in to the statement that Solar is "cheaper"
if the government adds all kinds of fees to everything but solar of course solar will be cheaper, but that is an Artificial Result created by government intervention in the market place not technology. The draw back of this is that increases the price of power for everyone and that hits poor people the hardest when their power bills double because of some new EPA Regulations
Depends. Fees that exist to influence direction of growth for opinionated reasons definitely represent a bias, but to NOT price in the shared impact (i.e. environmental impact, use of a globally limited resource (coal), etc) represents a bias in the opposite direction. I'm willing to bet (purely personal opinion) that fossil fuel costs do NOT fully include those common costs, and thus more than wipe out any bias represented in other fees.
I perfectly acknowledge that using "renewable" resources all have shared costs as well, and likely involve some sort of non-renewable impact. I'm just saying you need to include those costs to have an even remote chance of a fair comparison.
Not permanently, but considering that coal was our biggest power source in 2013, that is an enormous change.
few countries have effective carbon taxes. the EU emissions trading system isn't doing its job for example because they handed out too many credits which deflated their price.
Regulations also apply to renewables. especially wind and the necessary cross-country powerlines suffer from nimbyism.
If we take the opposite hypothesis, which is that we can't afford living here because we're limited by actual resources, it means there are too many people on Earth. If USA were strictly equally divided, each person would have 32,000 square meters to produce wealth. While that seems enough to grow carrots for one person, it may not be enough to grow enough of them to exchange with televisions, meat, health care, education and store for retirement. The average human's footprint is higher than their share. In this case, it's not too much mechanization or automation, it's that both the rich's footprint and the poor's footprint are distortedly higher than the goods they've produced. Here you go: The money we have isn't worth what we believe, USA can only exist through the slavery of Chinese workers, and we shall see some sharp adjustment for the rich in the future. Unless they keep on distorting the economy in their favor.
A side issue is recent history over the past couple centuries has revolved around replacing old forms of energy with new ones orders of magnitude cheaper. So far its worked out well. Because we haven't collapsed yet isn't a justification for it always working in the future. And now we're pretty well done with oil and coal with nothing to replace them, certainly not something orders of magnitude better to continue the trend of growth.
Another interesting exponential is the economy seems to do better with exponential growth in native population. Those aren't growing because economic conditions are awful. That leads to even worse economic conditions, leading to even lower population birth rates...
I was a carpenter, I retrained at 28 and it was rough. I can't even imagine being older. Most of the guys I worked with out in the field didn't even own computers. They were just getting real phones. It's a brain rewiring not just picking up a couple new skills.
People are good with technology grew up with it their entire lives. There are exceptions, but if anything, they prove the rule.
You're not going to go to school and retrain to be a programmer or some type of professional in a small town where there are 2 web devs and a little ISP two towns over.
You're not going to move a family to a tech hub at that stage of your life so you can start over in an entry level job.
it's tough to retrain. now add kids, low savings, and a mortgage. then you re-start at the bottom of the salary ladder. now it's time to retire.
my prediction: trump does nothing to address this problem whatsoever.
What was done then, and it's still in progress in the few mines that are already open, was to provide amazing early retirement deals: Instead of laying off young workers, anyone over 50 gets to retire with full pay. While that minimized the pain to secondary industries, as the retirees still kept their income, The region ultimately produced less, and massive emigration followed. This doesn't make me wish for this solution on anyone.
The best solutions, which I don't think are practical in US rural communities for cultural issues, is to incentivize replacement industries: For instance, St Louis hollowed out for decades, just like Detroit, but the city is doing better lately by fostering technology startups near its universities. This is revitalizing areas of the city that were slums for decades.
It seems difficult for American rural areas to do this though, if just because of the big culture clash between the old school America and people that create companies imitating San Francisco culture.
Google also punishes pages that show one thing to the crawler and another thing to human visitors who click through on the search results, i.e. "cloaking" [0]. That is not the case here.
edit: Maybe your question is actually: why does HN -- and all other non-Google sites who link to WSJ articles -- continue to link to WSJ articles when it provides a bad experience for the user? HN admins have made their position clear that the content of WSJ articles are worth going through the workaround.
[0] https://www.searchenginejournal.com/17-ways-to-get-de-indexe...
'A user coming from a host matching [www.google.] or [news.google.] must be able to see a minimum of 3 articles per day.'
Isn't this a net neutrality violation? Because of their monopoly, they are able to force a work around to get access to content and a better UX for their visitors at the cost of other referrers. A more fair/neutral program could be a 'limited subscription' type access where the content site allows a limited number of articles to users (from any referrer), Google gets access to content for indexing and tags the content appropriately as 'limited access'.
This isn't the case with search engines. If Google were to blacklist wsj.com, I have many easy options to get to wsj.com. Which is why Google and any search engine has wide latitude to heavily discriminate against content. That's literally the point of PageRank, or any ranking algorithm. Where they have gotten in trouble is when they're accused of promoting Google-made content above other content (especially when the Google content consist of scraped info from other sites).