Comment by enjo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by enjo | Hacker News Reader

This is another great opportunity to point out something rather puzzling about this recession.

If you have a college degree your unemployment rate is 4.7%, with a big chunk of that 4.7% in the building related fields (architects, civil engineers, etc... are having a tough go right now).

http://www.bls.gov/cps/tables.htm#monthly

It's a double digit unemployment rate if you just have a high school diploma. Meanwhile manufacturing output has actually increased dramatically, without adding any significant jobs. That's what I find scary. The U.S. is the worlds leading manufacturer (I'm having trouble finding data from 2009, but in 2008 we we're the largest manufacturer by a wide margin). Yet, manufacturing jobs are way down. I'm not sure those jobs are ever coming back. We've gotten crazy good at automation. Until the cost of human labor in the U.S. decreases by a rather large percentage, we'll continue to build ever more sophisticated systems for building things.

I'm not sure what that leaves us with.

I hear you. I'm an unemployed land surveyor re-learning how to program with Python (I learned BASIC and C in high school). So far I'm loving it and wish I'd never been sidetracked into such a dead-end industry. One way of making lemonade from lemons for me is thinking that at least there is some engineering crossover between the two fields. That's what I tell myself on a good day.

actually, there's huge opportunity in GIS right now where your skills would probably be really handy.

Yeah, I'd love to be a part of some kind of development outside of the ESRI juggernaut.

Basic income could be the solution to the unemployment problem caused by automation and higher productivity per person:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee

That is a clearly predictable outcome of overzealous regulators and labor unions. When overhead, risk, and direct cost are raised a business will rationally shift more resources into automation and electronics. The increase in price of unskilled labor means that the supply and demand curves don't actualize and what you get is less consumption of the resource, actualized through higher unemployment rates.

This also means that highly skilled people become more in demand because they are the ones that are capable of designing and implementing these systems.

Unleashed unskilled labor in a low cost country such as China doesn't help the plight of the unskilled labor force in America/Canada either. Especially with the artificially low Chinese currency.

The problem is that our current economic system is not ready to deal with such a high productivity level. With technology advancements eliminating entire job classes virtually overnight, in our lifetime we will reach a point where there will be way more people than necessary jobs; and the economic system will have to adapt. Two simple (not easy) solutions that come to mind are artificial population control or a different resource diatribution model.

I'm sure people thought like that when agriculture got automated and didn't need as many people any more. Higher productivity shifts people from industry to industry. There's often a lag between the death of one industry and the rise of another.

Just because it was true in the 19th and 20th century that human resources can reallocate from agriculture to manufacturing does not mean it will continue to be true in a future context.

Every day our R&D is chipping away at the necessity for a human labor force until we get to the day we have 0 percent employment.

There's another solution: massive differentiation of the economy. I think this is already starting to happen (witness the success of YC). Entirely new categories of products and services are springing up, many of which are meeting plenty of demand. In the new wired world, information about these new products and services can travel fast enough for them to serve distributed clienteles; this makes them much more viable than they would have been as local businesses. In short, the long tail of business models has opened up. It is a time of mind-blowing opportunity, but the opportunities demand creativity. It's not enough to do what somebody else is doing; you have to find another workable point on the long tail.

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