Structural Joblessness ...

[PsychoBabble]

Last edited Mon Mar 6, 2017, 06:35 PM - Edit history (2)

For the record, I am NOT a Larry Summers fan. Nonetheless, I try to read widely. I am open to considering reasonable options. You never know where a good idea may come from. Even Donald may stumble across one before his impeachment. You never know. Posting this Financial Times article excerpt below just FYI, because ...

I hadn't heard the phrase "structural joblessness" before, but it perfectly describes the problem we are/will be facing eventually ... what happens when automation takes over enough jobs ... that our economy can no longer function as a CONSUMER Economy .. because the consumer have no jobs, and not enough income to buy anything?

Suggestions like Guaranteed Basic Income have been floated as a way out. Still learning about +/- for myself. Just know that this is an 800# gorilla in the room.

https://www.ft.com/content/42ab292a-000d-11e7-8d8e-a5e3738f9ae4

"None of this is to minimise the problem of job destruction and rising inequality (although it is a major paradox that we seem to be seeing unprecedentedly rapid job destruction by machinery while at the same time observing extraordinarily low productivity growth).

Rather, it is to suggest that staving off progress is a poor strategy for helping less-fortunate workers. In addition to difficulties of definition and collateral costs, there is the further problem that in an open world, taxes on technology are likely to drive production offshore rather than create jobs at home.

There are many better approaches. Governments will, however, have to concern themselves with problems of structural joblessness. They likely will need to take a more explicit role in ensuring full employment than has been the practice in the US.

Among other things, this will mean major reforms of education and retraining systems, consideration of targeted wage subsidies for groups with particularly severe employment problems, major investments in infrastructure and, possibly, direct public employment programmes.

This will be a major debate that I suspect will define a large part of the politics of the industrial world over the next decade. Little is certain. But we will do better going forward than backward.

That means making America even greater, not great again. And it means embracing rather than rejecting technological progress."

[ymetca]

1. The elimination of jobs is the goal, not the problem

Bob Black's The Abolition of Work should be required reading for dolts like Larry Summers. (That, and a large dose of psilocybin, no doubt!)

I hope robots eliminate ALL jobs. The sooner the better.

We can start with such outmoded, primitive job as "elected representative". Technology could eliminate that odious job tomorrow. It is, after all, counterproductive to our continuing survival as a species on this planet.

[CincyDem]

2. 7. 5. 3. Key numbers when you think about jobs.

7 billion people in the world.

5 billion people of working age.

3 billion jobs.

To date, the pains felt in the US job market have been in large part due to geographic redistribution of jobs. More recently, the pain has been driven by the fact that that 3 billion is likely shrinking as technology replaces the human workforce.

At a minimum, GLOBAL structural unemployment is probably 40% and it's only going up from there.