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Old 2011-08-18, 12:18   Link #15892
Solace
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Join Date: Mar 2006
Quote:
Originally Posted by DonQuigleone View Post
Certainly if you go to U6 it is worse, if anything however it just that the current recession is worse then people may realise, but it doesn't indicate that unemployment has gotten worse over the past 70 years, as those statistics, while they may not be the precise unemployment, are proportional to it, and those statistics haven't shown any general trend upwards as industrialization has increased. They show unemployment going up in recessions and down in boom times.
We're getting off track a bit here.

My argument is that as technology has automated each sector, those sectors have shifted the jobs to new sectors. But the last remaining sector where you can employ massive amounts of people, the service sector, is also increasingly automating as well.

This recession, the one we're in right now, is more difficult to "fix" because sectors where you could previously grow jobs, like manufacturing, are being outsourced to cheap labor in foreign countries, and heavily automated whenever possible. There are not enough McJobs to go around unless you increase the amount of pointless "filler" jobs that automation is used to cut down on anyway, and there are only so many "high skill" jobs to fill because (to use an analogy) you can't throw more mechanics in a room and expect your car to be fixed faster.

80% of the labor force in the US is service based (the so called tertiary economy). When that gives way to mass automation, where do the people go? Back to farming? Can't. Back to manufacturing? Can't. Even if you stopped outsourcing somehow, you'd still bleed jobs because of automation.
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