If unemployment is down, wages should be up. But wages are down. That implies the unemployment rate is not accurately reflecting the true supply of labor.
Or, it shows what I believe: demand for labor is decreasing even as the economy grows.
From a week ago:
"An important measure of household income rose in December by the largest amount in nearly 8 years, signaling a long-overdue rebound in family earning power."
"Data from Sentier Research show that median household income in December rose 3.3% from the year before, the strongest year-over-year reading since October, 2006"
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/families-are-finally-earning-m...
From July:
"U.S. Wages, Benefits Rise at Fastest Pace in Almost Six Years"
http://www.wsj.com/articles/employment-costs-rise-0-7-in-sec...
https://s2.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/WphI5hi8meGKLNEtu6eygg--/...
So, incomes were flat or down for 14 years, and have since slightly rebounded to be just 4% less than in 2000, not 8% like they were. Shall I pop the champagne or do you want to?
Fact is, once enough slack is removed from a labor pool, wages rise. Happens every time.
It's exactly what occurred in the 1980s and 1990s. Wages weren't booming in the 1990s until the unemployment rate got to a certain low level toward the last several years of the decade.
I wouldn't expect wages to rise when U3 unemployment is 7% or 8%. I would expect to see it at closer to the 4% to 6% range. That's historically what has been the case, and we're seeing it happen again right now. If we add another ~3 million jobs in 2015, wages will rise at a healthy clip.
Or it could show this is a multivariable system with more than just one input?
I hope this is the case. Automation should be putting a great deal of workers out of the labor force. The question is how can we deal with it: through workforce education and skill retooling? Through social assistance programs? It will likely be the question of our generation.
Look at Django. If you include the hundreds of open-source modules with everything from messaging to billing to social media already coded, you can string together web apps in an hour that would take whole teams months and months from scratch.
Within the next decade or two I'd estimate that programming will hit its peak employment and start to decline as more and more work is automated.
And to be clear, there's still plenty of opportunity. Something like 3 billion people are supposed to come online in the next decade, there will be tremendous opportunities to create solutions for problems we can't fathom. But my point is those solutions can be implemented by a fraction of the programmers that used to be needed.
And while there will lag between VR becoming popular and its design process becoming automated as well, it will still happen.
I also don't think this is necessarily bad, I'm just trying to point out that the conventional wisdom of "if we send people to STEM fields we'll keep the traditional economy intact even with automation" is not a long-term solution. The logical end-result of current tech trends is you imagine something and it appears in front of you almost instantaneously, no coding required.
As others have said, raw creativity will take precedence over technical skills, and most realistically we'll need a basic income and severely reduced workweeks.
[1] http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=Z7x
Same graph, different y-axis.