the article makes this point better than I ever have (and I have tried).Diddy wrote:If heir is no one with money to buy the products what does it matter? I didn't read the article so maybe it addresses it, but don't you have to have someone to buy your product.
I'll try to read it today, I was working cows yesterday and didn't have time.docellis wrote:the article makes this point better than I ever have (and I have tried).Diddy wrote:If heir is no one with money to buy the products what does it matter? I didn't read the article so maybe it addresses it, but don't you have to have someone to buy your product.
Pioneer: Yes, That is the same guy they were interviewing on NPR. Thanks for the link to the article. I just posted it on fb.
I just saw found this article on vox:pioneer98 wrote:Someone posted on Facebook that said the the Twin Cities was the best of the large metro areas for upward mobility and had some of the lowest amounts of inequality. It went into some policy decisions and reasons why they thought this might be...Facebook chose to put an interesting "related article" right underneath it that said that the Twin Cities were actually the worst for inequality by race. I checked it out and the Twin Cities metro is 82% white. The #2 and #3 cities with the lowest amount of inequality were Salt Lake City (87% white) and Pittsburgh (90% white). Contrast these with the Chicago area, which is 55% white. Seems like the places where inequality is lowest is where there are fewer minorities.
One reason the American dream has come apart is that too few cities have shared their resources—and real estate—between the rich and the rest. This isn’t a fact of nature, like the mountains and oceans that restrain our coastal metros. It is a policy of our own choosing. The lesson of Minneapolis is that even our richest cities are free to make a different choice.
The U.S. labor force has been shaped by millennia of technological progress. Agricultural technology birthed the farming industry, the industrial revolution moved people into factories, and then globalization and automation moved them back out, giving rise to a nation of services. But throughout these reshufflings, the total number of jobs has always increased. What may be looming is something different: an era of technological unemployment, in which computer scientists and software engineers essentially invent us out of work, and the total number of jobs declines steadily and permanently.
They talk about why this time might be different.thrill wrote:John Maynard Keynes predicted the same thing 100 years ago. We're still working pretty hard.
After 300 years of people crying wolf, there are now three broad reasons to take seriously the argument that the beast is at the door: the ongoing triumph of capital over labor, the quiet demise of the working man, and the impressive dexterity of information technology.
• Labor’s losses. One of the first things we might expect to see in a period of technological displacement is the diminishment of human labor as a driver of economic growth. In fact, signs that this is happening have been present for quite some time. The share of U.S. economic output that’s paid out in wages fell steadily in the 1980s, reversed some of its losses in the ’90s, and then continued falling after 2000, accelerating during the Great Recession. It now stands at its lowest level since the government started keeping track in the mid‑20th century.
• The spread of nonworking men and underemployed youth. The share of prime-age Americans (25 to 54 years old) who are working has been trending down since 2000. Among men, the decline began even earlier: the share of prime-age men who are neither working nor looking for work has doubled since the late 1970s, and has increased as much throughout the recovery as it did during the Great Recession itself. All in all, about one in six prime-age men today are either unemployed or out of the workforce altogether. This is what the economist Tyler Cowen calls “the key statistic” for understanding the spreading rot in the American workforce. Conventional wisdom has long held that under normal economic conditions, men in this age group—at the peak of their abilities and less likely than women to be primary caregivers for children—should almost all be working. Yet fewer and fewer are.
• The shrewdness of software. One common objection to the idea that technology will permanently displace huge numbers of workers is that new gadgets, like self-checkout kiosks at drugstores, have failed to fully displace their human counterparts, like cashiers. But employers typically take years to embrace new machines at the expense of workers. The robotics revolution began in factories in the 1960s and ’70s, but manufacturing employment kept rising until 1980, and then collapsed during the subsequent recessions. Likewise, “the personal computer existed in the ’80s,” says Henry Siu, an economist at the University of British Columbia, “but you don’t see any effect on office and administrative-support jobs until the 1990s, and then suddenly, in the last recession, it’s huge. So today you’ve got checkout screens and the promise of driverless cars, flying drones, and little warehouse robots. We know that these tasks can be done by machines rather than people. But we may not see the effect until the next recession, or the recession after that.”