We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

I'd say that it hasn't in the past because up until 60 years ago, humans were the decision makers doing everything.

The divergence is that to form a single job a knowledge worker requires far less capital compared to a manufacturing job. A developer needs 10k in equipment to be productive compared to 100k's for a manufacturing job. When you actually adjust for the US regulatory and tax environment the gap increases even more, making overseas manufacturing a no-brainer.

I think the mainstream is surprised by this technology shift, because technology is finally replacing non-tech industries that didn't expect to be replaced. Nobody was surprised when blacksmiths were replaced, because they were "old tech" being replaced with "new tech". When brick&mortar retail or law get replaced, there's a lot of gnashing of teeth.

So I think you are correct that there will be a net increase in jobs, but it may take quite a while for developed countries to experience this. In the meantime, they are on the look-out for explanations.

If humans were required to learn, say, programming in a week, they would completely fail. Learning an industrial job in more than a decade to transition away from farming is much easier.

It could be that the skills needed to be employable are too difficult for people to learn in the time available. I think this learning time is fluid. It could be a function of cultural expectation of self reliance, for example.

What is funny is that plenty of roboticists point to an inflection point in the future when service jobs become displaced, which will dwarf these problems. The change will be bigger and the time to adjust will be smaller.

One might well ask, why not now ?

Given a(t)t, where a(t) = rate of new jobs created per year

-b(t)t, where -b(t) = jobs lost due to technology per year

Problem is, the function a(t) is stable and predictable over time, because human populations are generally sigmoids ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_growth )

Whereas the function b(t) feeds on itself ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoregression ) If you deploy technology, and said technology is successful, you then deploy more of that technology, which is then more successful, and so on...At each step, b(t+1)>b(t).

Take a decent time window...say going back 50 years, for which we have reliable data for a(t) and b(t). Run the simulation. You will posit that '-b(t)t' beats 'a(t)t' at some point in time 't'. Why should t be 2011 ? Well, why not ? The curves have to meet up someplace. Might as well be 2011 :) However you slice it, they will intersect and from then on you will get net negative jobs at some point of time. Whether that's 2011 or whenever is immaterial.

A second answer might be that we're only now fully realizing the effects of globalization -- outsourcing, moving factories to China, call centers to India, etc... due to the advances in telecommunications and whatnot. Perhaps there was an underlying structural shift as early as the 90's, but we were coasting on the housing boom. I recognize that that's a rather hand-wavey argument. IANAE.

Right now the IT industry is mostly making things cheaper and to some degree faster (you no longer have to wait until the next days paper to get to know what happened yesterday) however most of what is produced are final goods and there is only so much of the which can be consumed; whereas the amount of steel you might use if it were free is likely to be many thousands of times higher than today (since manufactures would use it everywhere they could) you aren't going to read even 50 newspapers a day if they were free -- you don't have that much time.

The same is the case with games and television -- you don't have the time to play more than a few hours a day at most so it doesn't matter whether Farmville is much cheaper than going to the chinema.

So the only way it seems different to me this time around is that today most of what is produced falls under my self created economy of final goods whereas previously much of the innovation and improvement has happened earlier in the value chain.

One notable exception to this seems to be open source server software (and computers in general, although they now seem to be much faster than the average person needs) which makes it much cheaper and easier to start a tech company (indeed patio11 famously spend $60 on bingocardcreator.com) but at the same time these companies also typically makes a lot less money than the companies they disrupt.

Don't confuse a contraction of investment with "the end of human labour", and then find a correlation with changes in technology. It's fallacious reasoning.

Up till now, you couldn't really outsource the job cheaply enough. Now, it's cheaper to build something on the other side of the world and ship it here.

True efficiency emerges from high productivity when the technologies employed are thoroughly understood and applied properly. And that takes time.

Disruptive technologies increase productivity too, but stunt the emergence of efficiency by hindering the thorough understanding needed.

The last significant disruptive technology affecting jobs was the adoption of the internet -- circa 1997. Since then, organizations have had a lot of time to understand their technologies and improve upon them. I believe the layoffs we have seen in recent years, both in the office and on the shop floor, reflect that.

Presuming things are different, I see five obvious answers to the original question (and "all of the above" is also an option).

1) The amount of regulation and regulatory burden has increased sufficiently between then and now, that new business relationships have a much harder time replacing old destroyed business relationships. I.e., it's now more expensive to hire a new employee.

2) It's a novel change in the financial side of the economy. Like, capital-holders now try to make killings by investing in the right HFT funds instead of trying to go out and invest in new businesses. Implausible? Maybe, but finance has changed a lot recently, so the difference, if there is one, might be there.

3) The amount of re-education required to get a new job has increased enough to be a killer barrier to re-employment, whether because of employers having imposed an arbitrary demand for bachelors' degrees or because the jobs are actually more complex.

4) Ricardo's Law does allow individual regions to lose as a result of tech improvements, because if someone else beats your comparative advantage, people will want to trade with them instead of you. There's nothing ahistorical about the Rust Belt having a persistent recession within the US. This is now happening to the whole US; people no longer want to trade with us, but China is growing plenty.

5) The Thiel hypothesis: Recent technological developments are intrinsically more boring than past technological developments; people are trying to build web apps that will sell to Google for $10 million instead of trying to invent the next "microchip" or "electricity". It's not that the 21st century poses a novel obstacle to forming new business relationships to replace old ones; rather, 21st-century technologies that obsolete jobs are missing a wow factor or wealth-generating factor that previously increased demand or increased total wealth at the same time as obsoleting jobs.

I disagree with this premise. IMHO, it is much simpler: we as individuals lived beyond our means for 20+ years by borrowing money against our houses and against our personal word (e.g. credit cards). We as governments lived beyond our means in terms of direct spending as well future spending promises (e.g. promising retirement/pension/medical benefits that are funded by borrowing or not funded at all). Big companies also promised retirement (pension) benefits that assumed a continuing growth of the investments that backed the pensions - that didn't work out so well.

"But why now, when it hasn't in the past?"

In the past, we relied on general growth exceeding our indebtedness, "growing" our way out of our debt. This is a game that cannot go on forever... and the longer it goes on, the worse the crash will be at the end. Right now, it is looking pretty tough.

In short, we lived beyond our means for 20+ years. We will have to live "below our means" for a substantial number of years to balance our past spending against our current and future incomes... and that assumes we have the will to make the hard decisions to truly reduce our spending rather than claiming to reduce spending, but the "reductions" are 2/5/10 years in the future.

A big part of living "below our means" is buying less, paying down our debt, which means lower demand and thus lower job levels.

http://www.fee.org/pdf/books/Economics_in_one_lesson.pdf

Because technology != technology.

A great deal of human labor in general is spent organizing information. Every industry from construction to tourism. Every scale, from villages to corporations.

It is fundamental to the very concept of "work", and it is being rendered obsolete very quickly thanks to high internet penetration rates and mobile computing.

Historically technology has displaced humans, but there has always been something that is cheaper to retrain humans for than it is to build machines for. For one thing you can explain to humans what to do, and they could turn an incredible amount of computing power to figuring out, following, and filling out your instructions. Computers simply have not had anything close to a human brain.

However as the complexity of our machines goes up, and the costs of automation go down, eventually we'll come to a point where it is cheaper to design and build a machine for a new job than it is to train someone to do it. At that point humans will be displaced and new jobs won't show up for it.

By a back of the envelope estimate, we're perhaps 10-15 years away from having computers with the raw computational power of a human brain. Software will follow, and the successes of things like Watson suggest that it won't take that long for software to catch up enough to be economically useful.

Once it is possible to train a machine faster than a human, the cost of buying and running that machine puts a cap on what that human can expect to be paid. Given Moore's law, that cap will descend painfully quickly after it first becomes an issue.

Advances in ocean-faring ships led to colonialism. Train travel led to a rapid westward expansion of the United States. New farms get established, and new towns crop up to serve them, needing homes and markets to be built, a local newspaper, a local grocer, a local bank, eventually local radio and television stations. Similar basic economic structures get replicated in many diverse geographic locations. Once one place gets saturated, people move and start up another franchise of the town model.

Skipping ahead fifty years or so, the web means I don't have as great a need for the local bookstore, the local newspaper, the local television or radio station, the local bank, etc. There are plenty of businesses that I still need locally, but they in turn don't have as great a need for the local advertising agency, the local newspaper's classifieds section, the local accountant, the local lawyer, the local travel agent - assuming there's still a local owner, with a local HR department, local management structure, etc.

Of the startups you see, how many are going to end up with a business whose operations need to be replicated in many geographic locations? How many are ever going to be more than an office in the Valley or NYC and maybe a few sales outposts? How many pitches are you getting that require large marginal outlays on labor in order to scale, and how would that requirement affect your investment decision?

No, it's fear. Banks are afraid to lend, and so SMBs can't expand. Corporations, sitting on trillions of dollars, are afraid to hire because they think it's too risky.

Catch-22.

Maybe now, unlike ever before, computers and robots can do most of the tasks that (relatively) unskilled humans are capable of, for less than minimum wage.

Two hundred years ago, most people worked in agriculture.

Then came technologies such as the McCormick Reaper, Whitney's Gin and Newcomen's engine - away went the vast majority of that work.

Yes much of it was replaced with something else and much of what replaced it was more pleasant, but the conclusion that the jobs which replaced agriculture are permanent is not forgone.

[edit] The technology upon which jobs depend in the modern era is finance, and that has been largely diverted to purposes other than creating jobs in the US over the past several decades.

I'm not sure; that's what I want to explore.

But I think the scale enabled by the net creates such profound efficiency and disintermediation. craig newmark sees himself as a philanthropist of classifieds; his (estimated) $100m business helped disrupt more than $13b in classified revenue. The funds are a dividend for the transactors so the value is not gone, but jobs are.

Look, too, to Clay Shirky's cognitive surplus. In the comments on this post at Google+, Eric Reasons brought up entertainment as an example. They get a double whammy. The people formerly known as the audience (TM Jay Rosen) now have more ways to entertain/distract themselves and can "consume" less entertainment. They also can make more entertainment, ending the scarcity and providing no end of free competition to the industry. There will be much more entertainment, but fewer jobs from it.

Look at retail. Practical necessity required there to be brick-and-mortar stores with much inventory and sales staff across the country as a channel of fulfillment. No more. RIP Borders. Now it is much more efficient, of course, to consolidate and fulfill commodity goods at a distance. Thank you, Amazon. Again, fewer jobs, which won't be replaced.

Transparent pricing in the market will lower prices and reduce the ability of retailers to benefit from pricing opacity. More efficiency. Less profit. Fewer jobs.

Even in my "trade," education, we know what's coming: open courseware will replace third-rate lectures.

Yes, I'm well aware that say, in the shift from agrarian to industrial economies, efficiency shifted jobs from farms (greater efficiency) to factories (greater wealth). The factory equivalents today -- startups -- create great wealth but with fewer jobs.

I say none of this to criticize technology. It's just reality. I will argue as I explore this topic that we must look at policy alternatives for more investment in entrepreneurial ventures and education (of both youth and displaced workers).

But as we get better doing what we do, as we become more efficient we need less people to do a particular job.

Now without new types of Jobs being created by new technology, efficiency can net kill jobs

Another point to consider is that other factors are surely at play that accelerated the net killing of job, such as outsourcing and so on (outsourcing of course, is make available because of advancement in IT and communication)

Well we are living in exponential era, everything that happened in the past has been fast forwarded exponentially. Fast Fast Fast forward, the rate is exponential.

Look at last 10yrs & compare the growth 20-30yrs ago, or rate of global warming, or how fast you travel today or efficiency in communication, or how much time did google take to become threat to Microsoft, or facebook to google, or even youngest billion air!

You name it! This rate can be catastrophic for us.

Jevons paradox is that "technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource". Watt's more efficient steam engine increased the consumption of coal, the cotton gin increased the consumption of slave labor, and virtualization has increased the consumption of servers. If technology can increase the efficiency of human labor, won't it increase the demand for labor as well?

Because increases in consumption are no longer able to keep pace with increased productivity?

We now have sufficient technology in all areas to allow for both; the global distribution of knowledge working, sufficient advancements in production technology to increase output efficiencies in specific areas that centralization of output for the global economy can occur (e.g. agri output from say brazil supporting a large % of global soybean consumption - and manifacturing in China supporting a large % of global doohickey consumption)

We are reaching a change in the overall model of economies, where previously each nation was duplicating a large portion of the industries as their production was only enough for internal consumption.

If you look at the entire planet as a single resource zone, then naturally you will have uneven distribution of resources, production, knowledge, etc... thus uneven distribution of labor to support this.

If we could see a heat map of the globe's resources to people to markets to [name a factor]... etc. but weighted by their pull in each direction, then maybe we could better model how the global economy really looks.

Extra Credit: weight the flow of this map to energy dependence and you'll really see how fragile this little world is.

In the past, one of the most significant limiting factors on business growth has been the cost of human labour, and technological development has focused on working around this limitation, eliminating manual jobs and creating jobs improving the technology.

However, as the world population grows and certain very important finite resources, such as fossil fuels, become severely depleted (especially fossil fuel reserves that can be extracted with less energy than the fossil fuel contains), these resources become a more important limiting factor than human time.

I therefore predict that in the future, far more work on technological development will go towards sustainability, and less will go towards minimising human labour. Employment will rise, while the price of anything which is not sustainably produced will rise in real terms relative to the cost of labour.

Due to the relatively higher costs of energy intensive transportation, I expect that there will be some degree of reversal of globalisation with respect to physical goods (but not other industries). Technology will probably play a role in allowing one family or small local community to do locally what currently takes a global network of large companies.

I think inequality will still be a real risk long term - if we ever reach the point where the food production system can be completely automated, and everyone had at least enough technology / capital to produce what they needed to survive and be healthy, poverty would be eliminated - but if only a few people owned all the capital, and squandered most of it on luxuries while others starved, that would be a significantly worse outcome.

I think that the widespread criticism of consumerism is the sign of an important event : now that we have a car, a fridge, a computer, a TV, more clothes we need, hot water, and a fully equipped bathroom, we just don' have any more demands.

If the population had the same demands as in 1700, it would be trivial to fulfill them. It would require maybe one day of labor per month per individual. Our demands grew faster than our production capacities, making the working week just a bit shorter, but now the demands do not increasing at the same pace as our productivity.

We have just reached the point where our material needs are fulfilled and we demand immaterial things : free time, healthcare, etc...

Could this be the point of inflexion toward a post-scarcity economy. I really wish.

In discussing potential Medicaid cuts in New York, advocates claim that over 12% of employed people in NYC are in healthcare. I have no idea whether that's true or not, but if so, it has real negative implications.

So its not technology that's the problem, it's the fact that we're going nothing to produce new wealth, and are exporting our wealth overseas via the importing of most manufactured goods.

Why now? Because the technology is finally competitive with humans across a wide range of tasks. Yes newer, some new jobs opportunities do open up, but they're often jobs that those displaced are simply incapable of doing.

We've picked all the low hanging fruit - in technology and resources.

Our cars haven't really change much in 100 years. Same basic engine, just added computers (we did that in the _1970'_).

We're only incrementally improving technology (cars with navigation).

Our current innovations (Twitter, FB, Google) don't produce many jobs and in fact reduce number of jobs. People will spend the night on FB vs going out to dinner, a movie, etc. You don't need to go out to cure boredom/socialize.

Also, Social websites don't produce much commercial activity (compared to say the automakers building Detroit into a first tier city in the last century).

We're patenting one click check outs, but we haven't found a good (economical at scale) replacement for the major components of our economy - e.g. the internal combustion engine and fossil fuels.

The US has has an abundance of cheap land an resources PLUS the country was lucky enough to grow up in the industrial revolution when technical innovation was relatively easy and world changing (compared to now where it's much more incremental).

We're going to stagnate until someone (US,Chinese,Indian,other) makes some big leaps in alternative energy and other advanced technology.

Web apps aren't going fix our economic problems (however useful they are).

The current technology revolution is even more overarching -- yes, there are new jobs being created, but at a fraction of the existing job base. This is not just a "claim" -- it's verifiable fact that can be easily concluded by perusing corporate employment ranks (GM used to employ nearly 1M workers -- contrast that to a modern internet company or even modern corporation which have been diminishing in employment ranks since the 90s). Review the government Labor department jobs reports -- most of the jobs created (outside of health care) are the kinds of jobs easily replaced by robotics / automation. The only damper that prevents a greater rate of transformation is the inexhaustible supply of cheap labor -- the presence of a humans willing to work at fraction of another, a seemingly bottomless pool. Might not be relevant for skilled jobs (though it is, at a lesser degree -- non immigrant visa workers supplanting American programmers for instance -- note that I am not making a case against immigration, just that immigration does have an economic effect on native workers).

See [Robotic Nation](http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm) for a good summation of this -- yes, productivity and efficiency rise at an aggregate level, but the benefits do not accrue equally to all.

Ford, and every other company, ran a 48 hour work week in the united states until Ford decided his factories were efficient enough that he could hire more people, pay everyone the same for 8 hours less labor, and thus sell more cars. Most every industry followed.

Now we've nearly a tenth of the workforce unemployed, but the story people tend to ignore is the actual hours of employment demanded per capita. The far scarier story than the United states unemployment is its underemployment, where people are willing to work but only get a few hours. Employers want to employ more people...but they can't fill more labor-hours. They can split those hours up, and because of that, a lot of the job loss is hidden.

Does anyone know of any other animals losing their jobs to robots?

In 1100's europe, there was land that was cleared for cultivation and forest. Most land holdings had areas of wilderness. They cleared it as the population increased. If the landholder could have instantly increased the population, he would have put the new people to work clearing land and planting crops (probably via leasing it to them as a landlord, or some kind of serfdom, but the mechanics of that don't matter here). So, the number of 'jobs' available on a given landholders property might have been 5000, while the population at the time was 400. There were more job openings than there were people.

Later, factories pulled population away from farms and improved farming allowed the land to feed more people than actually lived on it. This reduced the number of farmers needed as a proportion of the population, so if the population were the same as in 1100, the 5000 jobs we had before might have dropped, perhaps to 2000 jobs, or rather, food prices would have dropped so that lots of people no longer saw farming as the best idea. However, the population had increased greatly. My hypothesis here is that the number of jobs that could have been productively filled was still higher than the population.

This process can't continue forever. Sooner or later, the number of jobs simply crosses over the number of people looking for work. In history, I can imagine a leader, seeing lots of able bodied, desperate, and incredibly cheap manpower seeing an opportunity to raise an army and attempting to expand their own wealth by expanding their lands. That was a natural brake on the population line. Today, thankfully, we don't have any mechanisms that drastically reduce the population whenever people get desperate, there isn't wide areas of undeveloped land that can absorb as many people as we have over above the jobs line, and technology continues to increase productivity at a respectable rate.

So that is how I explain why the jobs line can cross over the population line now, and why we may now be in a situation where we might expect to have less jobs than people who want jobs for a long time.

Short answer: technology destroys jobs for dumb people and creates jobs for smart people. Until now this has been okay, because there have still been enough dumb jobs for all the dumb people. But as technology continues to progress, we (without genetic engineering or eugenics) run into the point where we have more dumb people than useful things for them to do. There are no jobs doing manual labour, and the dumber members of society aren't smart enough to perform the new jobs of maintaining the robots which do the manual labour for us. What, then, is the use of these people, and what do we do with them?

50,000 BC: your "job" (finding food) so dominated your life that your entire community followed it around.

20,000 BC: farming began. Your "job" is in the field by your house.

1700 AD: agricultural revolution. Technology allows smaller number to produce food. This allows industrial revolution. More specifically, this creates surplus food which means people can move. And so jobs can move. But it also means that areas that cannot produce food competitively no longer have to. Surplus food allows jobs to move to where the water wheels and resources are to commence industrialization.

1800 AD: The invention of the steam engine frees jobs from the need to be near flowing water: i.e. to move to where the resources are, or where the need to be. For much of the UK this was near ports as raw materials (e.g. cotton) came by ship. Bonus if the port is near a coal field. Again, areas that do not have cheap access to transport and coal, no longer have jobs.

1970 AD: Oil, giant ships, containerization and "free" trade allows jobs to move where wages are cheaper. Entire nations are uncompetitive at manufacturing.

2005 AD: Communications revolution. International calls are free. Service industry jobs move to where wages are cheaper. Entire nations are uncompetitive for service industry.

2008 AD: Computer Vision revolution: computers can now do picking and sorting that previously required a human.

201X AD: Robot Dexterity revolution: computers can now do fine motor skills, such as stitching shoes. Nike finally stops using child labor.

What is left for humans?

Technology has been killing (but not net killing) jobs for centuries.

Is this true? Or is it the case that as technology kills jobs, the unemployed find make work? That is, even if the unemployment level in a country has stayed the same, does it mean that the new jobs that the displaced workers perform are useful, or just a drain on society? Sure in the 19th century there were new non-make-work jobs. But today? Example: people working at Hallmark stores. Example: layer upon layer of middle and upper management. Perhaps it doesn't matter: if society can support make-work jobs, because of efficiencies elsewhere, then as long as people are employed it doesn't matter how. The problem would be if those make-work jobs could no longer be supported. This is what is happening: it is not in China's interest any more to support the vast inefficiencies of the US economic system. Make-work jobs are going away.

Finally, WWII: we destroyed most of the world economy to the point where the US was the world economy (ok, 75% of it). Does this have anything to do with the US having full employment (i.e. hiding technology's job kill) - and if so, now that the rest of the world has caught up, might we now see that the US economy cant support the make-work jobs?

But there should be a point in the foreseeable future at which technology will progress too quickly for mortals to keep up, despite the best education and economy. It wouldn't be the first paradigm shift of this magnitude. At one point in our past human population increased dramatically from farming, so even if people wanted to go back to hunting they could not. Then towns sprung up because farmers learned to produce a surplus. Then there wasn't enough land for everyone who wanted to farm.

Similarly today, we can have some people "farm" or do the essential work and produce such a large surplus of food, raw materials, technology, etc., that others will be freed from jobs, just as ancient towns were freed from farming.

Frankly we could make such changes with today's technology, but the economy and culture may not be ready. Instead we create contrived jobs.

Same can be seen in almost all industries.

For centuries this trend was offset with appearance of new kinds of production. New fields opened new markets and new places for work.

Lets ignore the current situation and ponder where does it lead us. It is inevitable that in the future most of day-to-day stuff we use will be produced by robots with minimal up to none human oversight.

There is only that much that we can consume. There is only that much of different kinds of produciton we can require. And we can not all be working in a creative capacity, inventing new stuff and inventing new markets. Inavitably a day will come when it will be technologically possible to supply all day-to-day the needs of world's population with stuff and services supplied mostly by robots.

What will happen then?

From several hundreds years ago, when people produced mostly for themselves, to the distant future when we all be serviced by robots and efficient production chains we see a definite trend. Somewhere along the path there should be disruptive events for this to happen, when a 'tension' produced by efficiency leads to massive losses of jobs.

For most of the time during the whole history the argument "it is not different then the previous time it happen" will be valid, but there will be definitely times it wont be the case. And it is possible that now is one of those times. Rise in effeciency must lead to loss of jobs eventurally. May be the time is now.

Oh, and this future is not necesserily a very dark one. After all, having most stuff produced effectively only means that most of the population will not have to work. Mey be it will lead to large portion of the population being a "dead weight", burning their life in leasure, and small energetic minority engaging in moving us forward, I don't know. May be it will lead to a large production 'surplus' that we will use to colonize the solar system and beyond? May be something else...

But I think we need to start thinking of what the society will look like when most people will not have to work to lead a decent life? What incentives will we need to invent to still have enough people to move forward? How to prevent degradation? I don't think artificial limits on automation and technology is the answer, but we might eventually come to this. I can see a politician introducing a SaveTheJobsBill to outlaw massively automated factories. We need to start thinking about it now, before it actually happens.

Yes, high unemployment isn't permanent or a long-term trend. That isn't really relevant though when you're talking about the prospect of blood in the streets prior to returning to decent levels.

The US seems completely arrogant in the sense that they don't seem to think this can happen to them, or that their military superiority somehow insulates them from civil unrest.

That said I do believe automation will begin to eat away at jobs when we get to the point where robotics can duplicate the functions performed by low end labor. What I mean by that is up until now computers have largely replaced more cerebral occupations. That allowed the people in those occupations to move on to higher level thinking.

Think of the growth in economic theory since the computer was invented. That had a lot to do with the fact that we can now test economic models in minutes instead of months because a computer can do the calculation.

So in those cases the computer didn't replace the job it just enhanced it. But dock workers doing heavy lifting aren't going to to turn into robotics engineers. Meaning the change coming with robotics will be different from previous technology shifts. So in that sense I think he's correct.

Who in their right mind is going to tell you they're going to be employed by something that doesn't yet exist?

It's hard to look at the world today and see how the status quo projects forward. But if you don't mind wild ideas (personal computers! portable phones!) and can wait a decade, maybe things don't look so bad.

Counterpoint: What do I do during that decade?

*Creativity exercise: think of some things. What if we replaced massive power plants with massive amounts of tiny generators (wind, solar, water)? Who would install, build and maintain them? What would happen if we switched cars from gas to natural gas? What would happen to the money spent fighting cancer if a preventative therapy could be developed? What if we switched from batteries to capacitors?

I think we'll soon see robots take many of those jobs.

And yes, I'm frequently ridiculed for that opinion. But I really think it will happen during my (late) lifetime.

If what you're talking about is Keynesian government stimulating the economy in bad times by going into debt, that could also be accomplished by cutting taxes rather than borrowing to pay pothole fillers.

I wish that I had watched this when I first started job hunting: http://tedxcmu.com/videos/charlie-hoehn

I think his plan is good. The job hunt is dumb, demoralizing, and at the end of the day you aren't really making anything. Your partner should learn something! (Maybe learn programming? There's lots of jobs in that-- that's what I switched to.) At the very least he should continue doing civil engineering projects on his own. Boost his portfolio.

(oh, also, my dad is an economist and he has a crystal ball. Best gag gift for an economist!)

Have they? In the long term, definitely, but in the short term, a sharp increase in automation is sure to have an effect on the amount of human labor required. Isn't a normal cycle that technology begins to replace workers but then those workers retrain and then get new types of jobs and recover their employability? It seems we're currently doing a poor job training existing workers and future workers, if anything.

The challenge of civil engineering is that you need to be professionally licensed. As you know, a new graduate has only taken the EIT (Engineer in Training) exam. You need four or five years professional experience before you can sit for the PE exam. In fact, in at least one state (Massachusetts?), you need to submit at least four inches thick of completed engineering calculations to prove your experience. The PE exam is very difficult, especially for structural engineering. I have friends who failed twice (the passing curve is statistically determined after all tests are scored, in some regions).

That being said, I have a Civil Engineering degree, and I never was paid to do any engineering calculations.

What most people who do not go through an ABET-accredited engineering 4-yr program do not know -is that an engineering degree is a superb background for building problem solving skills. The entire curriculum is based on problem solving and later, problem definition.

I believe that if your partner so chooses, he could develop fluency in the programming language of his choice. The most important thing though is that either he wants to do software development or already had programming skills.

You cannot motivate someone by burning them, the fire must be lit inside them, by them.

Consider checking out this: http://www.kolbe.com/

$$ skills survey much better than MBTI

I work as an iOS app developer, a role which didn't exist just three years ago. There are millions of developers out there on the various smartphone platforms, a market that Apple spawned after seeing what hackers could do by jailbreaking iDevices and loading apps on the iPhone without "permission".

I wouldn't have a job now if I weren't for the iPhone (I live over 5000 miles from Cupertino) and there are many like me all around the world. Meanwhile, I can't think of a single watchmaker that has gone out of business.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-21/switzerland-s-watch...

I don't think that centralizing the value creation incentive engine was good anyway, but now it's barely possible.

There are theoretical cases under which trade can make a country worse off, but they are rare situations and cannot be simplified down to "inputs flow around today but didn't during Ricardo's days". That doesn't even make sense.

But what bugs me most about your post is your belief that we should work to keep wages high for overpaid middle class American by prohibiting poor Chinese and Indians from having access to world markets where they might actually earn their marginal product. People are all for drinking fair trade coffee and supporting AID's programs in Africa. But when it comes to having to compete on a level playing field with foreign workers all that altruism goes out the window.

this needs to stop. you compare the working conditions of the laborer in china with the laborer in the US and bemoan the conditions. instead compare the laborer in china with the country field worker in china.

you can't magic a billion people into the middle class lifestyle that you find the minimum tolerable. the 2000-2010 has been the greatest decade in all of human history in terms of the overall raise in the quality of life for humanity as a whole.

"The problem for the elites is that these are not sustainable political or economic policies because eventually unemployment will reach unacceptable levels and the right leader will come along and tell the real story to the American people."

How are the American people supposed to recognize this unique truth and distinguish it from the "truth" that all current and former leaders and politicians have been telling to date?

If the American people are the lawn, how do we know when to trust the lawnmower when it says "this time it will be different?"

N.B Australia's whole economy is worth about the same as the U.S's debt.

My point is factually valid.

Public works DO create jobs, it's an empirical fact. Just because the OP hates the idea doesn't mean public works don't create jobs. Maybe he thinks UPS should fill the potholes, but either way, the only way to fill them is to hire people to fill them, whether the government or private business does it doesn't change the fact that someone was hired to do it.

In fact, it's better than that:

- That calculation doesn't include the savings in reduced wear and lack of deferred maintenance. - Construction labor is now much cheaper than it would be at full employment. - Growing consumption now would more than pay for itself in taxes from an averted "lost decade."

Unfortunately the folks in Washington are still worried about 3% inflation and how interest rates are going to spike any day now. So we end up with spending cuts that will almost certainly worsen the deficit over a do-nothing approach.