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Given that as of today only 60% of people 16 and older work, needing 50% to sustain mere livelihood seems unreasonable.

While I agree the current agricultural model needs support from various others, I do think the remainder 8% employed is sufficient (approximately 20 million people). This is mainly due to how little support agriculture actually needs.

For example, there are 5.9 million working in "Installation, maintenance, and repair occupations", and of those, only 42,000 are "farm equipment mechanics and service technicians". Much of the remainder, such as auto mechanics, would not be necessary in a world where 90% of the people don't need to work and thus don't need cars.

Another way to look at it is that the service industry employs 125 million out of 156 million workers. No matter how you slice that, most of them will not be necessary to keep the farms going, especially given modern agriculture predates most of those jobs.

Of course, any number between 0% and 90% would be possible, depending on the amount UBI provides and human psychology. Neither of which we know right now, and the latter being impossible to know until we actually try it.

Unemployment has been moving down on the same glide rate starting in 2010 under Obama.

Unfortunately for Trump we're at the bottom and there is no where for the unemployment rate to go except back up, and he'll get blamed for it.

(adjusted for constant dollars)

The "constant dollar" measure is virtually worthless. It's based entirely on the Consumer Price Index, which is a number derived from a "basket" of goods that is adjusted at the will of the government. For example, it doesn't count education costs, or fuel costs, or medical costs. Let's say the price of chicken goes way up. Well, the CPI adjusts by assuming people will just eat pork instead. If something gets too expensive, it just gets taken out of the index entirely.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/p...

The actual rate of inflation is much closer to 10-12% than the 2.2% the government publishes. If you take that into account, you will find that no, the income per capita has not increased since 1970. In fact, it has declined for most workers, precipitously.

As a side note: even if you accept the government's inflation number, then most workers have lost ground since Trump's tax cut bill was passed in January. According to Trump's own Bureau of Labor Statistics (see pages 7-8)

https://www.bls.gov/web/eci/ec...

Remember that story about how Americans' paychecks were going to go up by $4000 thanks to the tax cuts? It was a lie.

I wonder if it is just caused by less companies failing. If you look at the number of companies being started each year (source), it has been failure steady over the past 20 years. Maybe the share of companies which are younger than 2 years is a symptom of less companies failing. If company failure rates were higher in the decades preceding 1985, then of course young companies would be larger percentage of all companies.

Could this just be a case of playing with statistics to create a good headline for a story?

Ok, so since you're logically challenged, I'll lay it out for you:

Since we're not Marxist, the workers do not own the means of production. I agree with you that as processes are automated, production costs fall. In general, people are vastly more productive than they were a few decades ago. However, wages have not really increased in the last several decades, while the wealthy have gotten far, far wealthier.

Where did that money come from?

Where did the money saved in decreasing production costs go?

In your mind, these do not seem to be related at all. I can't fathom what you think explains these two things.

In the last 10 years, 15 million additional people have left the labor force.

So more productive workers, stagnant wages, the wealthy getting wealthier, and far more people not working is evidence of what, if not a serious change in the labor force?

Open your eyes and look at the world. It is not what you've constructed in your head.

U6 is low, too. But anyway, U6 is the wrong number to use: unemployed people who can't be bothered to even apply for one job a month have mental problems not economy problems.

You say "historic low"; it should be made clear it's not a record low. The percentage of adults working, the labor force participation rate, was lower than this until the early 1980s. In the eighties, the number of people working significantly increased. It stayed relatively stable at that higher level for 26 years. Then it dropped very significantly from 2008-2016. It's been fairly stable for the last two years.

You can set a data range here to see the trends:
https://data.bls.gov/timeserie...

If you want to cram all of this into a headline or tweet, the headline would be:
Real unemployment fell under Obama, to pre-Reagan levels.

So unemployment is actually 36%, not their phoney bullshit "historic low" 3.9%.

Right. But we don't expect our 5 year olds to go to work in coal mines anymore. The statistics don't count kids, the elderly, or the disabled. The unemployment statistics everyone throws about is trying to count people currently looking for a job. And that's important because they're all competing with each other. (other than tradesmen and professionals and specialists, whom should really look at statistics within their own niche). The part where the statistic is bullshit is that it ignores people who have given up. NEETs. It ignores a lot of people on bullshit disability. It doesn't account for underemployment like a mathmatics PHD handing people coffee or cutting edge vertex shader developers cranking out business SQL scripts.

REGARDLESS of the bullshit though, it's been consistent* bullshit so you can compare the number to other years. And yeah, the rate is low in historical terms.

* I dunno though, don't they change how they count now and then? When was the last big rule-change?

What I'm saying is this: by and large older workers are less productive. They take time off for their kids, their health, etc.

Actually, you're not describing older workers there. Although the age at which people start having kids is going up, most people still have them in their thirties, not their forties or fifties. By the time you're at the age that most people think of as "older workers", the oldest kid is old enough to drive around the younger kids, so they aren't taking as much time off as younger workers for their kids.

And health problems can happen to anybody. For older folks, you have more internal medicine issues; for younger folks, you have more injuries. Yes, at some point, the problems do get worse and more frequent, but if you ignore the people whose health issues are directly caused by their work (chronic injuries), that decline usually isn't until people are close to retirement age. And for the people whose health issues are directly caused by their work, the company shouldn't get a free pass.

Older workers do expect more vacation time, of course, but really, it's more accurate to say that young people are more tolerant of not getting enough vacation than they should be, rather than the other way around.

They're not willing to work 60/hr a week with 20 of that unpaid in exchange for vague promises of promotion. There are a ton of other reasons too. So unless you've got a special case like Walmart where workers are so unreliable that it's worth taking the productivity hit for consistency or need highly specialized skills then older workers just don't make economic sense

Young people shouldn't be willing to work ridiculous hours either. It leads to burn-out, and in the long term, it only hurts the companies that abuse their employees like that. But as for the productivity hit, I think you're underestimating the benefits of experience. On average, young people spend more time doing work because they are less efficient at it. The older folks usually get the same amount done in significantly less time, because they know all the tricks to get things done more quickly, having figured them out through trial and error. This tends to be true across all industries.

Also, in customer-facing jobs, it is very useful to have older employees, because many of your customers are older, and will tend to prefer interacting with people who are not kids. The whole "they show up reliably" thing is only one part of the equation.

This is an economic reality we all should face. The sooner we do the sooner we can talk about what to do with all these under employed (or unemployed) workers. If you're a young'un reading this now you're either going to join the older set or die. Literally. It takes years to set up a structure to protect people since there's going to be a ton of resistance. Now's the time to start supporting change.

Most of the unemployed or under-employed workers are not really that old. That chart is sort of confusing, so I'll break it down for you by looking at May 2017.

• 16–17: 13.1%
• 18–19: 14.7%
• 20–24: 6.7%
• 25–34: 4.9%
• 35–44: 3.3%
• 45–54: 3.2%
• 55+: 3.1%

Notice what you don't see in those numbers? Growing unemployment with age. That's because for the most part, those laws protecting older workers from discrimination actually work.

Now if you look at the numbers based on education, you see a nice pattern. These numbers ignore everyone under 25, which is to say that the unemployment numbers for people without a high school diploma are not artificially inflated by people still in school.

• Among people with high school diplomas, 30% fewer are unemployed than among people without diplomas.
• Among pe

What I'm saying is this: by and large older workers are less productive. They take time off for their kids, their health, etc.

Actually, you're not describing older workers there. Although the age at which people start having kids is going up, most people still have them in their thirties, not their forties or fifties. By the time you're at the age that most people think of as "older workers", the oldest kid is old enough to drive around the younger kids, so they aren't taking as much time off as younger workers for their kids.

And health problems can happen to anybody. For older folks, you have more internal medicine issues; for younger folks, you have more injuries. Yes, at some point, the problems do get worse and more frequent, but if you ignore the people whose health issues are directly caused by their work (chronic injuries), that decline usually isn't until people are close to retirement age. And for the people whose health issues are directly caused by their work, the company shouldn't get a free pass.

Older workers do expect more vacation time, of course, but really, it's more accurate to say that young people are more tolerant of not getting enough vacation than they should be, rather than the other way around.

They're not willing to work 60/hr a week with 20 of that unpaid in exchange for vague promises of promotion. There are a ton of other reasons too. So unless you've got a special case like Walmart where workers are so unreliable that it's worth taking the productivity hit for consistency or need highly specialized skills then older workers just don't make economic sense

Young people shouldn't be willing to work ridiculous hours either. It leads to burn-out, and in the long term, it only hurts the companies that abuse their employees like that. But as for the productivity hit, I think you're underestimating the benefits of experience. On average, young people spend more time doing work because they are less efficient at it. The older folks usually get the same amount done in significantly less time, because they know all the tricks to get things done more quickly, having figured them out through trial and error. This tends to be true across all industries.

Also, in customer-facing jobs, it is very useful to have older employees, because many of your customers are older, and will tend to prefer interacting with people who are not kids. The whole "they show up reliably" thing is only one part of the equation.

This is an economic reality we all should face. The sooner we do the sooner we can talk about what to do with all these under employed (or unemployed) workers. If you're a young'un reading this now you're either going to join the older set or die. Literally. It takes years to set up a structure to protect people since there's going to be a ton of resistance. Now's the time to start supporting change.

Most of the unemployed or under-employed workers are not really that old. That chart is sort of confusing, so I'll break it down for you by looking at May 2017.

• 16–17: 13.1%
• 18–19: 14.7%
• 20–24: 6.7%
• 25–34: 4.9%
• 35–44: 3.3%
• 45–54: 3.2%
• 55+: 3.1%

Notice what you don't see in those numbers? Growing unemployment with age. That's because for the most part, those laws protecting older workers from discrimination actually work.

Now if you look at the numbers based on education, you see a nice pattern. These numbers ignore everyone under 25, which is to say that the unemployment numbers for people without a high school diploma are not artificially inflated by people still in school.

• Among people with high school diplomas, 30% fewer are unemployed than among people without diplomas.
• Among pe

People might be the same, but technology is always progressing. Per-worker productivity in the US is at an all-time high[1], yet income has lagged far behind. In 200 years, we'll have even more technology, and if we're lucky, also a system of wealth distribution that allows the fruits of progress to trickle down to the common man.

Now if we're really lucky, it'll be the robotic 80% of humanoids who are poor, and the fleshy 20% doing well.

[1] BLS (chart 5)

Easy to "cut" the unemployment numbers when tens of millions of people exit the work force, unvoluntarily. When the labor force participation rate starts to swing back up, then we'll know we're starting to achieve real full employment.

Then, why is the US at full employment if it isn't working, and billions of dollars of bonuses being handed out?

First, the trajectory of unemployment numbers is only a continuation of the Obama years. If anything, the graph is flattening out under Trump.

https://data.bls.gov/pdq/Surve...

You sure about that, friendo?

if Prime video services worked on my non Fire android box.

Amazon isn't in control of that. Hollywood is. They insist that streaming video services be encrypted in one of two ways.

• As a software player on a general purpose computing device (i.e. a PC). In this case, Hollywood requires the video stream decryption happen inside an encrypted virtual machine so you don't simply save a copy of the decrypted video before it's sent to your video card. That's why Amazon, Netflix, Hulu in a browser requires Flash or Silverlight.
• As a dedicated hardware device. Amazon, Netflix, Smart TV makers, blu-ray player makers, etc. have to submit one of these devices running their service to Hollywood, who then approves it or denies it based on how secure they deem the hardware video decryption to be. If your Android box is custom or doesn't have a large market share, Amazon may not know it needs to submit it to Hollywood for approval. Prime Video works fine on my Nexus smartphone and Galaxy tablet.

If Hollywood didn't have a stick up their collective asses, you could simply download and install a generic Android Prime Video app and run it on any Android device. But because of Hollywood, Amazon (and Netflix, Hulu, etc) have to put code in their players to detect your device, and if it's not on the Hollywood-authorized list, bomb out.

(and Prime didn't increase in price 10-20% every year)

Prime was $79 when it was introduced in 2005. It just increased to $119 in 2018.

That's a 119/79 = 1.50 = 50% increase in 13 years. Or 1.5^(1/13) = 1.032 = 3.2% per year.

For reference, $79 in 2005 adjusted for inflation passed $99 in 2017. And Amazon announced the price increase the next year. So the price of Prime has been exactly keeping pace with inflation, except Amazon has added a ton of features to it since it was first introduced.

Unemployment continues to grow. The economy is not working for American citizens. A few already-rich people have got richer, and everyone else got poorer under Trump. Those ordinary people who saved anything on their taxes saved on average about sixty bucks, and will get reamed forever after.

Do you not perform research, or are you just functionally retarded? America's unemployment rate is SUPER low right now....because of Trump and his policies.

Source: https://www.bls.gov/news.relea...

"According to recently released data, the IRS has processed 128.8 million tax returns submitted in 2017 so far, and has issued more than 97 million refunds. The average taxpayer who received a refund got $2,763, an increase of roughly 2% over last year."

Source: https://www.fool.com/retiremen...

https://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_cha...

IMO the most important thing is to choose a career in a field you'll enjoy. You'll probably be doing it a long time. If you enjoy it, you should do well. If it's a drag, you are in for a long life of drudgery that will result in poor performance and commensurate low earnings.

We do already not have enough jobs for the people looking for one. What exactly should we do?

We do? Somebody should inform the Bureau of Labor Statistics because they seem to think that only 4.1% of people who want to work aren't. https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2...

Most economists agree that anything under 5% is considered full employment. Of those that are currently unemployed most are simply in the process of changing jobs or something like that. Of coarse this only represents the U.S. but the U.S. is also one of the biggest users of automation. https://www.themanufacturer.co...

Therefore, while what you say does make for good news headlines it doesn't appear to be true at the moment. Do we have to figure something out? Yes. Will we? No. Our political climate won't solve a problem this big until unemployed people with pitchforks are marching in the streets.

The South has lower unemployment than the national average.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, US national average unemployment rate is 4.1%.
From that same source, average unemployment rate for Southern states only, comes out to 4.18%.

For the average to be below the national, more than half of the Southern states would have to be discounted, concentrating only on Tennessee (3.4), Virginia (3.5), Alabama (3.7), Arkansas (3.8), Florida (3.9) and Texas (4.0).
Of the rest, only Oklahoma and Kentucky are at national average, while the remaining 50% of Southern states average out to 4.55%, with their range spanning from Maryland (4.2) all the way to West Virginia (5.4).

And that's seasonally adjusted. With raw data, average unemployment in the South is higher, at 4.35%.

The South has lower unemployment than the national average.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, US national average unemployment rate is 4.1%.
From that same source, average unemployment rate for Southern states only, comes out to 4.18%.

For the average to be below the national, more than half of the Southern states would have to be discounted, concentrating only on Tennessee (3.4), Virginia (3.5), Alabama (3.7), Arkansas (3.8), Florida (3.9) and Texas (4.0).
Of the rest, only Oklahoma and Kentucky are at national average, while the remaining 50% of Southern states average out to 4.55%, with their range spanning from Maryland (4.2) all the way to West Virginia (5.4).

And that's seasonally adjusted. With raw data, average unemployment in the South is higher, at 4.35%.

The South has lower unemployment than the national average.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, US national average unemployment rate is 4.1%.
From that same source, average unemployment rate for Southern states only, comes out to 4.18%.

For the average to be below the national, more than half of the Southern states would have to be discounted, concentrating only on Tennessee (3.4), Virginia (3.5), Alabama (3.7), Arkansas (3.8), Florida (3.9) and Texas (4.0).
Of the rest, only Oklahoma and Kentucky are at national average, while the remaining 50% of Southern states average out to 4.55%, with their range spanning from Maryland (4.2) all the way to West Virginia (5.4).

And that's seasonally adjusted. With raw data, average unemployment in the South is higher, at 4.35%.

Wind/solar/battery technology will progress until it solves all our problems; all we need is faith, a bit of time, and mountains of money. Maybe. That physical reality and math impose limitations is not something that most people are equipped to understand.

Wind is so much cheaper than coal that a bunch of conservative republicans in texas have converted to wind. They're doing it because of the math. Solar progresses rapidly, and battery, with it's slow progress, is being proven already today, so it's not going anywhere.

Here's a thought: at least try to follow the math of people who have taken the time to lay it out simply. Sure it is easier to remain an ignorant tool, comfortably ensconced within the green herd, but if you aren't headed in the right direction, you will never reach your destination. Reality has the final say, and you will pay the price for your foolishness.

Doh, you're right. I hereby give up my good wind turbine job, and will immediately look for the first coal mine to dive into. Follow the money!

Ok, seriously, nobody is saying tech will solve all the problems. But greens are saying you can make money with green tech, and doing so helps with the problem. Why not do that a lot more? Sell our tech to the rest of the world. Germany did it in the 90's, and made tons of money, sparked a run on their stock market, boom in real estate, and generally worked great until China started undercutting them. What happened to the US? We invented solar. Why in the world didn't we make some money on it? I'm not talking about manufacturing, I'm talking about innovation. What's the next thing? Let's not give up the money after we invent it just because of coal and oil lobyists.

The real median personal income in 1980 in 2016-adjusted dollars was $22,038, so your current salary wasn't even above average back then.

In 1901 (PDF) the average yearly household income was $750, which in 2016-adjusted dollars is about $20,274. Compared to 1901, you're currently earning about the same as the average family did back then. While that's above average for personal income, it pales in comparison to the actual extremely wealthy people back then. For perspective, just ask yourself how many railroad empires you own or how many murders you've been rich enough to get away with.

From your own link, median net compensation was $46,641 in 2016, the cost of that employee is about 150% of that ($35.87 per hour according to the BLS, that works out to $71,740 based on a 2,000 hour work year). The median cost for professionals was $60/hour or $120k per year, much closer to my original number than yours and the BLS numbers are direct compensation costs, there are things like office space and HR costs that raise it to at least my number.

And yet, CA is not only the largest manufacturer state in America, but they outdo the next 2 combined.

Not true. While California does have the most manufacturing jobs in total (hardly surprising given it has the biggest population) at around 1.2 million, the next two are Texas (840K) and Ohio (660K). And per-capita California isn't even in the top 10 either by revenue or by percent of workforce. There are WAY more manufacturing jobs in the Midwest than there are in California and the cost of living is much lower as well. Taking the states from the midwest as a group just from the top 10 they total over 2.7 million manufacturing jobs.

The fact is, that highly paid engineers would rather live in CA than.states like Texas, or Alabama, or Mississippi, or ...

Ahh, the arrogance of people thinking wherever they live must be the best. Ok smart guy, explain why there are WAY more manufacturing jobs and highly paid engineers in manufacturing in the Midwest than they are in your beloved California. Explain why there are more aerospace engineering jobs with equally high wages on the East coast. California is the leading state for some types of engineering (esp computer) but other parts of the country are stronger in other areas. And Texas especially has no lack of highly paid engineers.

There is nothing wrong with California but you don't have to tear down places you don't live and know little about to make it sound better.

That can be interpreted 2 ways: more who want to work can, or that more have to work to make ends meet instead of take care of family, etc.

I keep pointing out the second because people try to frame the labor force participation rate as the real unemployment rate. In this context, however, it shows that there are jobs for humans--not just that some percentage of those looking for work are able to work. So all of this tech hasn't been making jobs simply evaporate forever.

our recessions have arguably been getting longer and deeper.

If you graph LNS14000000 back to 1948, that statement is more-questionable.

That's one approach to spreading the wealth, but another is to tax the rich and use it to expand vocational education.

Vocational training is one part of it; but first, the jobs have to be available. You don't necessarily need to tax the rich, either, although we do need a revenue source and that's the likely one for adding a new universal college initiative. For universal healthcare, it's like 1.6%; for a universal dividend, the top tax rate actually falls by 3.6%, which makes room to get universal healthcare, college, and some tax shuffling in before you start raising that top bracket (it ends up at some 43% with everything including funding Social Security retirement and disability benefits exclusively by taxing the highest bracket). The Dividend actually ends poverty.

I generally try to avoid tax increases as best I can--the Dividend is designed to move the income level at which you're paying $0 or less in taxes upwards over time, and to lower costs (and taxes in general) strikingly around that level. Efficiency and fiscal responsibility are important: how do we pay for anything like free college and healthcare when we're already taxing at 100%?

Link doesn't work for me.

Works for me in an incognito window by copying the link on slashdot and pasting it into an incognito window in chrome. This is a work-in-progress that starts outlining the same thing. It looks like it dropped the query, so maybe this one for the whitepaper?.

my point was and is that raw efficiency may be secondary to other human desires/emotions, which could be why T was elected.

It's security. Individual people--and groups of individuals--need security.

I'll concede that my example was an anecdote, but according to this handy chart, employment growth started under Obama and has continued into the current administration.

Your point (I thought?) had to do with the distribution of wealth -- specifically with everyday working people. An real income rise (>5%) hasn't happened under previous administrations in decades and won't happen during this one -- I hope I am wrong.

That is utter BS. We have one of the lowest levels of those receiving unemployment benefits. But workforce participation is rather low. Which means, many are unemployed, or underemployed, and have been so for prolonged states of time.

Do you know how many college degreed individuals are working menial retail jobs and part time jobs at $10/hr? Tons.

About the lowest since 2000. (Please note, that first half of the last century was a single parent workforce, thus participation was lower, because a single job could support a family.)
https://data.bls.gov/timeserie...

I have no doubt that you heard about this, but not from a reliable source. https://data.bls.gov/timeserie... Coal mining employment has been relatively constant over the last year and still very low compared to where it was at the start of the Obama administration. Where this is due to politics or just the fact that nobody wants to buy coal when natural gas is cheaper could be debated. But there isn't a mountain of coal jobs coming back. More importantly, there just aren't many coal jobs at all so even if the number doubled, it would be a rounding error in overall employment numbers. https://www.google.com/url?sa=...

Those tools replaced a shitload of work (and thus jobs).

from 1939 the number of people in construction work has risen steadily from 2 million to over 6 million.
https://data.bls.gov/pdq/Surve...

I'm not proposing training subsidies, just some form of UBI.

Before proposing a solution, you need to establish that the problem exists. Are people actually losing jobs to automation?

Countries that have extensively automated include America, Western Europe, and Japan. Countries that have not include Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and Haiti. Are the 2nd group better off because they avoided the "productivity catastrophe"?

In the past, automation has caused some dislocation, but has resulted in higher living standards, and greater demand for labor. This is an example of Jevon's paradox, but it really isn't a paradox at all. If you are a factory owner, and you are installing machinery that can double the production of each worker, and double your profits from each worker, would you fire half of them, or hire more?

Some people claim that "this time is different" because the change is happening faster. The evidence says otherwise. Productivity growth is slowing down. The easy-to-automate manufacturing jobs are already automated, and service jobs, which are now 80% of the economy, are proving much harder to automate.

For what it's worth, it seems the NWS has nearly five thousand employees [washingtonpost.com], cutting 248 forecasters represents a 5% cut in staffing.

The federal government as a whole employs 3100 "atmospheric and space scientists". I was not able to find a recent number for specifically of forecasters at the NWS, but certainly not all 5000 NWS employees are forecasters. Certainly not all of the fed gov's atmospheric and space scientists work for the NWS.

If the 248 are in fact all forecasters, that may be a 5% cut in overall staffing, but closer to a 10% cut in forecasters.

Here are some interesting facts for you:
https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat...

13% of mining industry is female.
9% of the construction industry is female.
7% of leatherworkers are female.
9% of sewage treatment facility operators are female.
7% of industrial maintainers are female.

had to dig a little deeper to find welders/brazers:
https://www.bls.gov/cps/wlftab...
4% of the welders are female.

Approximately TWO percentage of the carpentry field is female (https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm). You could host all ~30K of them in a conference center.

However...
27% of computer programmers are female.

But it seems to be one long non-stop onslaught of "women in tech, women in STEM, female programmers, female venture capitalists."

Here are some interesting facts for you:
https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat...

13% of mining industry is female.
9% of the construction industry is female.
7% of leatherworkers are female.
9% of sewage treatment facility operators are female.
7% of industrial maintainers are female.

had to dig a little deeper to find welders/brazers:
https://www.bls.gov/cps/wlftab...
4% of the welders are female.

Approximately TWO percentage of the carpentry field is female (https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm). You could host all ~30K of them in a conference center.

However...
27% of computer programmers are female.

But it seems to be one long non-stop onslaught of "women in tech, women in STEM, female programmers, female venture capitalists."

Just tracing the problem back. People like to portray Chinese imports as Chinese brands, not as the result of American business engineering.

While I'm often critical of how litigious our society has become, I'm also glad for it as vendors marketing Chinese made children's toys containing lead paint can be sued, whether or not they made the design decision. For a society that provides examples of extreme callousness such as bridges made of garbage, American businesses have good reason to be extremely diligent in monitoring supply lines.

Along with middle-class and minimum-wage workers who can buy more quality goods and live at a higher standard of living.

Again, with the problem of income inequality, only being able to afford chinese 'goods' even as majority of families are dual income makes a declaration of higher standard of living questionable. I fail to see how this will be a net benefit in the long run.

Yes, but is local production necessarily a good thing? American consumers have limited dollars, and the employment market adjusts to job availability--just graph the absolute labor force from 2000 to 2017 and look at what happened around 2008's huge unemployment spike.

You can see a drop in H1-B approvals in 2009 and 2010, with some of that drop lingering in 2011. We also had students going to grad school to avoid the job market, and people retiring earlier (fewer late retirements). These are spot reductions in the labor force.

There's a well-debated theory of population growth called Mathusian Theory. Simply put: population grows in abundance, and shrinks in scarcity. Modern economists don't know what to do with this, because it seems about right, but they've never been able to pin down what exactly we're talking about being "abundant" or "scarce".

As a corollary, I've suggested with the above data that the labor force exhibits this behavior based on perception of job scarcity and the need for jobs. The ultimate scarcity is the scarcity of the means to survive. It's not "food", "housing", or anything else; it's whether your economy is currently able to carry people. The labor force responds in ways Malthus would find reasonable.

So what?

More-expensive solar panels means people work, get paid, and spend their money on more-expensive electricity and other infrastructure. It doesn't necessarily mean more jobs, and could even mean fewer jobs.

Less-expensive solar panels means we can pick something else we're better at and do that. Maybe we can sell it as export (although too much export is a threat to national security; it does bring wealth). Maybe we can just enjoy a thing we would otherwise be unable to afford (thus for which we wouldn't create the demand, thus jobs). These are real, likely outcomes.

Finally, China's wages, social insurances, and labor laws have been rapidly improving, in part to their dominance in global manufacture. We've been feeding them the economic power to improve their infrastructure and their technology, thus leverage labor better. They can pay labor better, provide better social services, and still come out cheaper. Trade benefits both parties--especially when one party can't afford the GDP-breaking cost of the machines and infrastructure necessary to build their economy up (see: some, but not all, nations in Africa).

...there are millions of middle-skill job openings and low unemployment in the US.

The unemployment rate is not the best number to look at, IMO - the government keeps obfuscating it, by mischaracterizing people's situations to make itself look good; see how George Bush created thousands of manufacturing jobs overnight by declaring fast food workers to be manufacturers.
 
A better indicator is labor force participation rate. As you can see here, in the years after the war, the rate was somewhat above 50% (which matches the social situation at the time, with mostly men working, and many women staying at home). The sixties brought the large scale entry of women in the workplace, which pushed the labor force participation rate to the high 60%. However, after peaking in the nineties, the rate has been falling steadily over the last ten years, and is now halfway back to the situation in the fifties. This contradicts your argument.

There are no social changes I'm aware of that would explain this decline. I believe (but keep in mind I'm not an economist), the decline is largely due to an economic factor: the replacement of workers (at least in the USA) with cheaper alternatives.

At this time, the alternatives are outsourcing (made easy by globalization), and automation (made easier by advances in technology). They both apply pressure on wages. Outsourcing pushes for equalization of the income of USA (and first world) workers and the income of workers abroad. Automation pushes for equalization of the income of workers to the cost of machines. Outsourcing has a certain lowest threshold - it won't depress the wages of American workers below the wages of workers in the poorest other country. However, I don't believe automation has any such built in lower limit.

like ... librarian. Then reasonable Web searches come along, and the demand for reference assistance dries up overnight.

Except that according to the BLS jobs for librarians haven't fallen, and are expected to grow by 10% over the next decade, faster than the general labor market.

So then, if all these adults making minimum wage should apply themselves and get better jobs, then where exactly are all these unfilled better jobs searching for employees?

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

• Workers with wages at or below the federal minimum made up 2.7 percent of all hourly paid workers.
• Although workers under age 25 represented only about one-fifth of hourly paid workers, they made up about half of those paid the federal minimum wage or less. Among employed teenagers (ages 16 to 19) paid by the hour, about 10 percent earned the minimum wage or less, compared with about 2 percent of workers age 25 and older.
• Of those paid an hourly wage, never-married workers, who tend to be young, were more likely (5 percent) than married workers (1 percent) to earn the federal minimum wage or less.

No, it doesn't, and the BLS category page makes it as clear as day: industries are below the occupation category reported for in the EPi report.

Manufacturing industry sales people are not "retail sales people".

The bureau of labor statistics disagrees with you. Read the charts
https://www.bls.gov/oes/curren...

This chart (#7) finds pay disparities on race and gender across all occupations:
http://www.epi.org/publication...

It doesn't adjust by industry. Different industries pay different rates for a job that may have a similar title.
A software developer on wall street gets paid a lot more than a software developer at a school

Here's the charts for "retail salespersons" https://www.bls.gov/oes/curren...

Gender and racial inequality holds across all job classifications.
Chart #7 of this series http://www.epi.org/publication...

I picked one line from that chart, retail salespersons. According to that chart, black female retail salespersons make $10.99/hr while white males make $20.12/hr

The bureau of labor statistics charts explain why: https://www.bls.gov/oes/curren...

If you are working sales in a retail store the average wage is around $11/hr
But if you are working sales in the manufacturing industries the salaries are $20+/hr

The EPI chart clearly doesn't adjust by industry. As usual, if you want to make more get a job that pays more.

A GDP chart, from 2015. Really? That's nice... Since you can't see me, I have a really annoyed look on my face. I have to wonder if you're just an idiot, trolling or just plain clueless with that chart. Probably trolling. Here's a clue, it's useless to what we're discussing. Unless you believe Trump somehow had something to do with the GDP at least two years before he was even elected president (since you appear to be math challenged, it's a 2015 chart, meaning it's from at least the previous year and Trump was elected in 2016, became Pres in 2017, so that's at least two years).

Since I'm sure a guy like you can't believe anything unless it's from the NY Times or WashPo, Here you go with a real article:
https://www.washingtonpost.com...

However any comparison to Obummer or anyone else for that matter is really premature. Yet I know they can't stand waiting. A footnote to the Obama administration is they changed how they figured the GDP so he wouldn't look so bad. Something a lot of people missed.

So you're hung up on GDP? How about black people back to work - https://data.bls.gov/timeserie... . So much for him being a racist. Is there a measure that is your favorite? Don't go looking for one, it's likely a fools errand. I don't think you'll find one.

Given the tax restructure rates just passed today, the largest in 30 years, this will be like rocket fuel for the economy. Money should return to the states, people will work again. America will be great again. If we had Hillary, we'd be headed for Venezuela. Where they're eating their zoo animals to survive now. Socialism never works, wherever it's tried. So only really stupid people support it over Capitalism. Might not be perfect, however it's the best man has come up with.

"We are at full employment right now"

The "unemployment rate" is the fake, cooked number that both the Democrat establishment, and the Republican establishment have the labor department report to the public. It is essentially the number of people collecting unemployment benefits and thus excludes:

[1] those who have exhauseted their benefits and are now being denied
[2] those who worked jobs that made them ineligible to file (there are certain job situations where the employer is not required to pay in and the terminated cannot file)
[3] those who were let go by employers who claim they were "fired for cause" (often a scam where the employer is trying to avoid paying his share of the benefits, a crime rarely investigated/prosecuted)
[4] those who were self employed and saw their work dry-up because of market conditions
[5] those who could not find a job and gave up looking

Look at the "labor participation rate" to see the actual percent of the working-age public who are without jobs. The actual data shows about a third are currently not working - about a 30% unemployment rate. This would get a LOT more attention if the feds and the states were not handing out so many welfare benefits and therefore a lot more of the unemployed were less comfortable without jobs. All the welfare calms down a large part of the unemployed population and thus prevents riots and political mayhem.

Trump is right to brag about the unemployment rate being better under his admin because the press and all the other politicians use that number to portray people like the Bushes, Clintons, and Obama in a good light, making it a fair oranges-to-oranges comparison, BUT that number should NEVER be used to determine that we are "at full employment" which is the lie the business interests want it used for so they can scream for more cheap labor to be imported.

Seriously. Why the fuck should I give a shit about the job market in the US? Especially if 99% of those "created" jobs include the phrase "Hello, welcome to Walmart".

There's a link to the Bureau of Labor Statistics report in TFA; here it is again. I believe this is what you might be looking for, since those Walmart jobs you disdain are almost exclusively part-time: "The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers), at 4.8 million, was essentially unchanged in November but was down by 858,000 over the year. "

Actually, it is the situation in the USA. Unemployment in America is at 4.1% while 5% is considered "full employment". Anyone capable of working can find a job, although they may need to move.

The U-3 unemployment rate is not meaningful, and even the U-6 is inadequate (this is by design.) The current U6 unemployment rate as of October 2017 is 7.90. Tell us again about "full employment", please.

The actual rate of unemployment (as opposed to published statistics) is somewhere between the U-6 and the inverse of the labor force participation rate, if you account for the people who aren't accounted for in the U-6 — those who have not looked for work in one year. Plenty of people have been discouraged to the point that they're just doing whatever odd jobs they've secured for themselves, but how many? They're difficult to measure.

The metric "unemployment is historically low" is a deceptive measure in the context of retail health. What that metric accounts for are citizens collecting unemployment benefits within a six month period. Once they exhaust the six months and they still have not found work, that metric does not include them.

Politicians love to use such a report to claim that "unemployment is historically low" when in fact there are other metrics from the BLS that uncover the true story. According to this document, it states that the labor force participation rate has decreased little in the past 12 months and to date that 95 million citizens - regardless of whether they are collecting benefits - are not in the labor force which is actually almost 40% unemployment. THAT is the elephant in the room no one wants to talk about. Retail is suffering because there is a huge sector of unemployed citizens who don't have the disposable income they used to, thus they are unable to patronize stores.

Steven Pinker last book The better angels of our nature talks about how much the cost of artificial light has fallen in the last three hundred years.

The absolute cost is one thing, that would make the absolute gain less. But it also matters than a few hundred years ago most people were farmers in the field and when it got dark you went to bed. Today the premise that shifting it matters is highly dubious, like here in Norway it's now pitch dark out and it's 6 PM. Does it matter? No, the lights are on and they'll stay on until I head to bed. As long as the daylight hours fall sometime between getting up and going to bed it doesn't matter when, because I'll fill the rest of the time anyway. The silly thing is that I'm wasting the precious daylight hours in the office. To flip the situation on its head, how many people would need more than ordinary interior lighting to work in the middle of the night? Looking at employment by major industry sector I'm guessing:

Mining 0.4%
Construction 4.3%
Utilities 0.4%
Transportation and warehousing 3.2%
Agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting 1.5%

That's almost 10%, maybe there's a few in other categories too but I think I'm generous if I say 15% of jobs are outdoors and the rest in offices, factories, stores, hospitals or such where you don't get any more benefit than at home. If society was smart we'd just start waaay earlier and have our daylight after work when we can actually do something more useful with it like be outside, while the oddballs would be those working then instead of those doing the night shift.