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Manufacturing Jobs On Decline Around the World (ampproject.org)
Reader Koreantoast writes: The New York Times posted an interesting thought piece (paywalled, this link could help) on the changing nature of manufacturing globally and the impact it has on modern politics and economic development. Although manufacturing productivity has jumped tremendously over the last several decades, the overall global pool of manufacturing jobs is shrinking as automation and new industrial technologies has increased the production and supply of manufactured goods with fewer people at a rate faster than global demand can absorb. The analogy is the agricultural revolution of the last several centuries where greater amounts of food are being produced by fewer and fewer farmers, displacing many of them. How will industrialized nations manage the growing number of displaced, blue collar labor? Bigger impact globally is that the shrinking pool of manufacturing jobs globally is closing the traditional route of export-oriented manufacturing economy that many nations, particularly in East Asia, were able to use to lift their nations out of poverty. What happens to those nations that missed the boat?"The likelihood that we will get a manufacturing recovery is close to nil," Professor Stiglitz said. "We are more likely to have a smaller share of a shrinking pie."
No, you begin looking at a living wage. After all, whether it's machines building the goods or people, the manufacturer, distributor and retailer are all being taxed, and those taxes should still go to support the society at large.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It's pretty obvious that most jobs will no longer be in manufacturing, just as most jobs are no longer in agriculture.
This does not in any way affect total jobs available, nor does it affect total good jobs available.
In a post agricultural world, we moved into manufacturing. In a post manufacturing world, we move into services. This is obvious, as it has already begun.
Services include poor jobs - cleaning, blue collar jobs - installing, good blue collar jobs - repair, and white collar jobs - inventing.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
More tariffs, higher walls, less predicable diplomacy. Then America will be great again!
You start looking at a universal basic income.
If their are not enough jobs, you need to ensure that everyone can afford food, housing and health care even if they don't have a job.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
+1 Insightful.
If you don't want to live in the equivalent of a third world country, where most people are dirt poor and living on the street and a very few are fabulously wealthy, you better start learning to live with a vastly expanded welfare state.
You are welcome on my lawn.
And white people who worked in the factories are collecting disability and hanging around Trump rallies.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Guilty.
But the only parts of libertarian thought I consider valuable are the bits that say no one has any justification in interfering with the personal and consensual choices of others with regard to non-macroeconomic and non-contractual behaviors. The rest is, as far as I'm concerned, bunk.
All for Basic Income. Furthermore, I see it as inevitable. The various attempts at analysis in the context of the type of economy we have now are, IMHO, missing the core issue by a very wide margin: when goods are available without your labor, you will not be laboring. Basic Income looks squarely at this inevitability and suggests a means to address it.
Underneath it all, there is a quickly eroding relationship between work and a happy life. Used to be you had to sweep the hearth with a broom. You had to make the broom, too. And there was every reason to look upon this as both worthy and fulfilling. Because it was necessary. Then others, much more efficiently, made the broom. Then came vacuum cleaners. Then came the Roomba and brethren. This is the path. This is not the end of the path. Trying to consider the issue as if the path stops here breaks any analysis at the starting line. The same thing will apply, and in the same ways, to truck driving, serving food, maid/butler roles, manufacturing, farming... the path will go on until there is no material need left to automate.
I do not, and I suspect few others do either, regret the loss of having to sweep the floor. I will not regret not having to clean the catbox, not having to mow the lawn, not having to shop, etc. There will be no existential crisis in my home due to increasing automation of labor. There will be no guilt when I employ my wholly-machine-made-widgetry, although if the capitalist-fixated manage to derail Basic Income and all suitable stand-ins for that economic functionality, I will certainly feel bad for the people they have screwed out of a very bright future.
I'm pro-personal and consensual choice, and wish to hell there was a decent formal mechanism to determine "informed" to back those concepts up. The future, indeed, seems to me to call loudly and obviously for shades. But that doesn't mean I'm not grumpy. Oh, I'm damn grumpy. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The really stunning thing is that there are many here on /., actually I would say a majority, who "can't see the forest for the trees" when it comes to where labor and jobs are going.
They are going away...
It will be a few decades, perhaps 30 to 50 years, when human labor of any kind will be almost completely replaced by, as Ford summarizes, "robots".
Who will pay taxes?
Who will decide who gets a UBI?
How will society deal with millions of unemployed?
How will human society over time come to terms to becoming, in effect, the "pets" of a larger machine state that cares for us?
How will the rules of robot warfare be worked out?
Who will maintain policies on what robots can and can't do?
How much decision making of all sorts will be given over to algorithms and "AI"?
etc, etc...
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
The US is a lot more adaptable than even many of its citizens give it credit for. When it was founded, the Industrial Revolution had barely begun, and large swathes of its population were still involved in agrarian or home manufacturing, much as their ancestors had been for thousands of years. By the middle of the 19th century, even in the midst of a brutal civil war, the US was competing with the Old World powers in innovation (the Civil War proved, as wars so often do, to be a boon for technological innovation). By WWII, the US was the pre-eminent world power, and despite all the claims of its waning, the US still remains one of the great economic power houses.
In reality, it has ever been thus. Every generation has its struggles, not just with itself, but with the previous generation, and the transition always leads to moments of revolution. The Baby Boomers may be trying to hang on to their power, and the wealth they accrued, but sooner or later they're going to walk off into the sunset. The Millennials have different priorities, just as the Baby Boomers did in their time.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Of course. And the less you have to do, the more you can choose to do.
It'll require many to change their mindset, but I think it's an attractive enough prospect that it won't be a horrifying undertaking for most.
There's the 1% and those who aspire to be like them; but I like to think most people are more interested in being happy and healthy than in excess for its own sake.
That may just be a case of un-called for optimism, though.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.